SPELLING (L)IT OUT IN THE AGE OF TOTALITARIAN DECORUM
THE RACEWASM of BIZLAM ISSUE
358 Responses to The Endless Thread 8.0
AH, THE PLEASURES OF RATIONAL SPEECH
Still so terribly/wonderfully/sleep-deprivedly busy working on Beloved’s Show, but let’s watch an hour-long video of charmingly intelligent Michael Parenti untie several psycho-politico knots for us…
Parenti at 16:00: the fundamental (and self-aggrandizing) Leftist error of giving the Right’s crafty “Incompetency” alibi a pass
at 27:00: how the Left has been gamed into accepting the Right-imposed parameters of “acceptable” discourse
at 33:00: the double-standard in using the term “Conspiracy”
For men most certainly Steven but judging by the bloke in the picture the gals may have had to search ( or is that lurch? ) a bit longer and deeper for libido-arousing males.
Comrade DJ Sensei ET, we cater mostly to Reactionary Sapphists around here these days (see above), but for our nostalgia-hungry Hetero sisters, the ’60s offered the following kind of thing in groovy abundance:
I’m not so rigidly hetero that I’m squeamish about the male body but the above nude singer-songwriter ( redolent perhaps of John Denver in his psycho-let’s-carve-up-the-wooden-chalet phase ) nearly made me regurgitate my shreddies and sultana breakfast ( we’ve been on tour so the larder is somewhat eccentrically stocked to say the least ).
Whalley Range where I used to live had an impressive population of social misfits and outsiders. One of the most extraordinary was a sikh who walked along having long, involved conversations with himself in two completely different voices. One was very similar to the first Tourette girl in the vid-clip.
If you walked behind him and closed your eyes you’d swear ( I feel duty bound to not correct the use of the word and emphasise the unconscious joke here ) there were two people. If you managed not to walk into a lampost whilst walking with your eyes closed that is ( always a hazard for those who imagine too much ).
Sure he wasn’t rehearsing for BGT, Comrade DJ Sensei ET? Returning to the above-posted video, I’m wondering how many of us can claim the parental mettle/Ninja skills required to go for a day of shopping in London with a Tourettesy-teen liable to shout “nigger!” in a sinister voice at the worst possible moment? Hats off to that mom (unless she’s with the BNP, of course)…
And how about this headline…?
Oral sex a ‘gateway’ activity for teens
Most teens who engage in oral sex for the first time will have vaginal intercourse within six months, a new poll indicates.
Remember when it was the other way around? Intercourse was a given (if you didn’t slip off the car seat on a puddle of spermicide, or the diaphragm, first) but oral was something you got if you were engaged or in a band. And anal… only if you were in the Boyscouts! (rim shot)
I have that crucial extra thirty minutes to post on TET tonight because Beloved performed her first gig of the new show I’m writing for her…. and I’m taking a break until rehearsals resume in a few days! As you know, being involved in a publicly-performed Art is so much less musty/taxing than writing prose and chatting (and/or flaming) about it. I compose a piece of music, rehearse it with Beloved and her musical outfit, they perform it, people in formal-wear applaud… wonderful.
However: your mention of White Noise (end of previous thread) inspired me to nominate it as the week’s U-Bahn book (never ride the Underground in Berlin without a book to hide behind). Very funny stuff in there I’d forgotten about… but there’s also the occasional sensation that Don parodies his trademark gnomic bathos… every now-and-then, a sentence much cuter or cooler than is really necessary pops up, when something a little grayer would have offset the adjacent splendors better. Minor gripe, in any case. The point of this digression being that a few days ago I had White Noise as a sidearm on the way to my lunch with Comrade DJ Sensei JR. We were having a falafel feast at picnic-style seating in the trendy-gritty borough of Kreuzberg (“Xberg” if you’re a hipster), munching, chatting, watching traffic in the not-too-chilly shadow of the falafel shop. An earthy-looking guy in a leaf-raking jacket and a watchman’s cap lurched into view to our right, high-fived Comrade JR and pointed as if he knew me and said, with his German accent, “Son of a gun!”
Lots of Germans learn their English from 60-year-old textbooks (the high-fiving they learn from 30-year-old Television shows), so I thought nothing of it. He spotted my copy of White Noise next to my plate of falafel and told me that a movie of his was mentioned in another book by Don (“The one about terrorism”… any DeLillo fan will laugh at that description) and so he’d written Don a letter. It suddenly worried me that my lunch was cooling just so I could listen to a mildly batshit guy say bullshit. I put some falafel on a fork and told him (facetiously, mind) that I’d love to get a look at Don’s response but he shrugged and said that Don had never answered. So the guy isn’t crazy after all, I concluded… just kind of sad. But he was cheerful when he said his goodbye and disappeared around the corner.
“I bet you barely recognized him,” said Comrade JR.
“Barely? Not at all.” (Said he, with his mouth full)
Comrade JR reminded me that I’d met that man about 15 years ago… and then it hit me who it was and that I’d casually described, to him, that day (four or five of us were eating pizza), the plot points of a comedy script I was working on: Son of a Gun. It all fell into place. I’d just been talking to one of Germany’s most famous and successful film directors, while my falafel cooled. And I’ve been sifting through “Falling Man”, looking for a reference to any film of his, for fucking days now…
Here are a couple of pix from Beloved’s gig tonight (featuring our suave Chilean axe man; also note sinister head of a plutocrat hovering over the instrument in pic 1):
I thought the business man’s head was part of the decoration.
When I lived in London I used to occasionally get work shifting pianos. I still have muscle memories of trying to move an upright covered in baroque carvings. Jeezis. We had to lift it over a kitchen bar that seperated two rooms. I wouldn’t recommend it unless you really want to get in touch with the middle bit of your spine and discover what muscle sub-groupings you don’t have.
Mind you it was as nothing when compared to trying to move a mellotron. It took about 5 of us to get it onto a trolley so it could be moved.
I hope you didn’t write a mellotron into your partner’s set and I hope the set went well.
I thought White Noise had some virtuosic pieces of writing – especially the bit at the end where the toddler breaks free on his bike. But it’s the rhythm that impressed for me – breathtaking but never too fast that you stop weighing it all up.
“The bit at the end” – I’m fluent in lit-crit speak aren’t I?
“I thought the business man’s head was part of the harp decoration…”
I just checked on the harp and, weirdly enough, the plutocrat’s head carving is a feature. How I never noticed that before I can’t quite figure.
Mellotrons! I (and Rick Wakeman) love mellotrons! Luckily, these days, they’ve got a silicon chip called “mellotron” and it weighs about a tenth of a gram so don’t say there isn’t progress.
Re: White Noise: full of brilliant shit (please don’t think my litcrit-speak pretentious)
No doubt there’s a silicon chip which renders today’s samplers heavier for the benefit of nostalgic roadies who “need to lug”.
Underworld next – availability in Manchester bookshop en route to London depending.
[ed.'s note: if you can't find a copy I'll snail-mail you one, Comrade DJ Sensei ET! And PS: incorporating, those paintings you sent, in a film, is still on the To-Do list! Operating on a geologic timescale over here... only the biological process of aging is reassuringly up to speed and on-track...]
The performance that the paintings you put up on TET ( 6.0 was it?) were for looks likely to happen in 2011. I have a meeting with a few festivals next week which should confirm all the money needed to make the show is there.
We pitched the idea more in bloody-mindedness ( this is what we want to do – take it or leave it ) more than in pragmatism. So sometimes it works.
By the end of the week the lapsang souchong should be flowing chez nous.
Thanks for the offer of the book but on my last visit to the relevant bookshop Underworld was there ( money in my wallet wasn’t so I chose White Noise instead ) so unless there’s been a “Celebration of De Lillo week with 80% off all his books” in the meantime it’s likely to still be there.
I discovered a batch of flick books I made to accompany a show we did in 2000. If you email me your postal address I’ll send one over to you.
[you'll have my snail-mail coordinates by the end of the day, ET... will be busy cleaning up a toxic Arts-n-Crafts mess with Offsprung until then]
[PS: click the link at Comment#3 to discover your porn name]
Have been in London town last few days and having to wait for my host to get back from work I saw “The Social Network” at the flicks . It’s about the guy who set up Facebook. A watchable film but interesting because it intentionally showed characters who were emotionally numb and morally blank without the usual let-out clauses that Hollywood actors usually demand if they are going to play unsympathetic people. Or if there were let-out clauses they were buried very deep. Or I am too old to be the film’s demographic and what passes for repulsive for me is seen as cool by the young.
Anyway Koons reminds me of that film. He’s like a packaged version of Warhol. If objects of a terrifying banality can be art than Koons is art I suppose. I saw an exhibition of those scaled-up Bavarian-style woodcarvings ( done I expect by the same sculptors whose work he is critiwquing – will these mirrors never stop appearing? ). Looking at them was like staring into something irredeemably stupid – more so than the originals because they are put in high class galleries and have a certain status placed on them.
“Or I am too old to be the film’s demographic and what passes for repulsive for me is seen as cool by the young.”
I’m afraid it might be the latter, Comrade. Go watch “SAW lll” and post your review here and we’ll know for sure….
“Looking at them was like staring into something irredeemably stupid…”
Exactly. And that’s what the Museum/Gallery Catalogs, and ArtZineTexts, are for, with so much Aht these days… the packet of granulated intelligence you can add to the product after the fact (if you want).
He led her in her red silk pajamas up a trail into the rugged back country and over a ridge, hiking what she estimated to be three to five hours to a crude campsite. There, she said, he “sealed” her to him as his wife and raped her.
She said she begged him to stop, pleading, “I’m just a little girl.” She struggled, but she said at age 14 she was no match for a grown man.
Afterward, she cried herself to sleep.
The next day, as she cried again, he told her she was “lucky,” Smart testified. He said he was a prophet and that God had chosen her to be by his side as he prepared for the second coming of Jesus Christ. She said she didn’t feel lucky at all.
This is the essential grandiosity of all religious thinking. The actions of this rape lunatic have crossed social and legal lines but his views of the world and the universe are well within the range of Normalized Delusional Grandiosity (NDG) which Jews, Christians, Muslims, Mormons, Witches and Scientologists offer their believers. We are nothing more than a part of the variegated blob of organic material on the planet earth. Compared to some bits of the blob, we are slightly fancy. We are even fancy enough, on the infinitesimal scale of local existence, to make the planet stink if we really, really work at it. But nothing we will do can make the universe “notice” us; human growth is not on the universe’s agenda; the universe is not a machine designed to respond to human thought. The earth is a speck. Even our solar system is a speck.
Won’t cheeseburgers taste as good or sex feel as great and love or art inspire us as much… if we face the facts? We’re of no particular importance. Except to each other. Why not focus on that and learn to be kind in the time accidentally allotted?
Civil, articulate, rational and well-educated Black American males are mocked, taunted, disdained and sometimes physically assaulted by Black and White alike. Disparaged as false, mask-wearing, deracinated and effeminate, they’re openly pitied as self-hating race-traitors. For every intellectually authoritative, non-clownish, non-effeminate Black Male who somehow manages to sneak an appearance on mainstream media, there are at least 10,000 animalistic, ignorant, menacing athletes, rappers, comedians and actors paid vast sums to act out the ugliest antebellum stereotypes of the Mandingo Unleashed. The 10,000 manufactured Black savages are held up as role-models for Black Male children; the non-effeminate, non-clownish Black Intellectual is not.
Then the New York Times publishes the following, while pretending to scratch its head, alarmed and perplexed:
An achievement gap separating black from white students has long been documented — a social divide extremely vexing to policy makers and the target of one blast of school reform after another.
But a new report focusing on black males suggests that the picture is even bleaker than generally known.
EXPOSING THE AUTHORITY TRAP: A Citizen Philosopher Effectively Refutes Slavoj Zizek from a Comment Thread (and you never even noticed)
The Philosophical Superstar often writes on topical subjects into which he has very little real (or original) insight, but his “authority” is the perfect cover, and the sugar-coating, on erroneous performances. Two texts are here juxtaposed: the first is professional, high-profile and considered worthy of contemplation; the second is a blog comment. The first text is horseshit, the second is illuminating. Let this be a warning.
(To deal with Zizek specifically, though Zizek is not, necessarily, the point of this post: is Zizek merely wrong here or strategically so? Did he generate the erroneous performance knowing that “pessimistic” texts from Left-leaning intellectuals don’t make money? Or is this just a matter of the Fancy Explainer, as anointed authority, giving in to the pressure to respond to every popular moment? Last question: is the “Authority” valued, by the Control and the Audience alike, for precisely what He or She won’t say?)
1. Why Cynics Are Wrong Slavoj Zizek
Days before the election, Noam Chomsky told progressives that they should vote for Obama, but without illusions. I fully share Chomsky’s doubts about the real consequences of Obama’s victory: From a pragmatic-realistic perspective, it is quite possible that Obama will just do some minor face-lifting improvements, turning out to be “Bush with a human face.” He will pursue the same basic politics in a more attractive mode and thus effectively even strengthen U.S. hegemony, which has been severely damaged by the catastrophe of the Bush years.
There is nonetheless something deeply wrong with this reaction — a key dimension is missing in it. It is because of this dimension that Obama’s victory is not just another shift in the eternal parliamentary struggles for majority with all their pragmatic calculations and manipulations. It is a sign of something more. This is why a good, American friend of mine, a hardened Leftist with no illusions, cried for hours when the news came of Obama’s victory. Whatever our doubts, fears and compromises, in that moment of enthusiasm, each of us was free and participating in the universal freedom of humanity.
What kind of sign am I talking about? In his last published book The Contest of Faculties (1798), the great German Idealist philosopher Immanuel Kant addressed a simple but difficult question: Is there true progress in history? (He meant ethical progress in freedom, not just material development.) He conceded that actual history is confused and allows for no clear proof: Think how the 20th century brought unprecedented democracy and welfare, but also the Holocaust and gulag.
Nonetheless, Kant concluded that, although progress cannot be proven, we can discern signs that indicate progress is possible. Kant interpreted the French Revolution as a sign that pointed toward the possibility of freedom: The hitherto unthinkable happened, a whole people fearlessly asserted their freedom and equality. For Kant, even more important than the — often bloody — reality of what went on in the streets of Paris was the enthusiasm that those events engendered in sympathetic observers all around Europe:
The recent Revolution of a people which is rich in spirit, may well either fail or succeed, accumulate misery and atrocity, it nevertheless arouses in the heart of all spectators (who are not themselves caught up in it) a taking of sides according to desires which borders on enthusiasm and which, since its very expression was not without danger, can only have been caused by a moral disposition within the human race.
One should note here that the French Revolution generated enthusiasm not only in Europe, but also in faraway places like Haiti, where it triggered another world-historical event: The first revolt of Black slaves, who fought for full participation in the emancipatory project of the French Revolution. Arguably the most sublime moment of the French Revolution occurred when the delegation from Haiti, led by Toussaint l’Ouverture, visited Paris and was enthusiastically received at the Popular Assembly as equals among equals.
Obama’s victory belongs to this line; it is a sign of history in the triple Kantian sense of signum rememorativum, demonstrativum, prognosticum. That is, it is a sign in which the memory of the long past of slavery and the struggle for its abolition reverberates; an event which now demonstrates a change; a hope for future achievements. No wonder that Hegel, the last great German Idealist, shared Kant’s enthusiasm in his description of the impact of the French Revolution:
This was accordingly a glorious mental dawn. All thinking beings shared in the jubilation of this epoch. Emotions of a lofty character stirred men’s minds at that time; a spiritual enthusiasm thrilled through the world, as if the reconciliation between the divine and the secular was now first accomplished.
Did Obama’s victory not give birth to the same universal enthusiasm all around the world, with people dancing on the streets from Chicago to Berlin to Rio de Janeiro? All the skepticism displayed behind closed doors even by many worried progressives (what if, in the privacy of the voting booth, publicly disavowed racism reemerges?) was proven wrong.
There is one thing about Henry Kissinger, the ultimate cynical Realpolitiker, that strikes the eye of all observers: How utterly wrong most of his predictions were. To take only one example, when news reached the West about the 1991 anti-Gorbachev military coup, he immediately accepted the new regime (which ignominiously collapsed three days later) as a fact. In short, when socialist regimes were already a living dead, Kissinger was counting on a long-term pact with them.
The position of the cynic is that he alone holds some piece of terrible, unvarnished wisdom. The paradigmatic cynic tells you privately, in a confidential low-key voice: “But don’t you get it that it is all really about (money/power/sex), that all high principles and values are just empty phrases which count for nothing?” What the cynics don’t see is their own naivety, the naivety of their cynical wisdom that ignores the power of illusions.
The reason Obama’s victory generated such enthusiasm is not only the fact that, against all odds, it really happened, but that the possibility of such a thing to happen was demonstrated. The same goes for all great historical ruptures. Recall the fall of the Berlin Wall: Although we all knew about the rotten inefficiency of the Communist regimes, we somehow did not “really believe” that they will disintegrate. Like Kissinger, we were all too much victims of cynical pragmatism.
This attitude is best encapsulated by the French expression “je sais bien, mais quand meme” (I know very well that it can happen, but nonetheless… I cannot really accept that it can happen). This is why, although Obama’s victory was clearly predictable at least for the last two weeks before the election, his actual victory was still experienced as a shock. In some sense, the unthinkable did happen, something that we really didn’t believe could happen. (Note that there is also a tragic version of the unthinkable really taking place: holocaust, gulag… how can one really accept that something like that could happen?)
The true battle begins now, after the victory: The battle for what this victory will effectively mean, especially within the context of two other much more ominous signs of history: 9/11 and the financial meltdown. Nothing was decided by Obama’s victory, but his victory widens our freedom and thereby the scope of our decisions. But regardless of whether we succeed or fail, Obama’s victory will remain a sign of hope in our otherwise dark times, a sign that the last word does not belong to “realist” cynics, be they from the Left or the Right.
In These Times, November 13, 2008.
then:
2. Posted December 3, 2008 at 12:40 amHussein Mahmud
To be honest I totally disagree with Zizek on this point. As a black male and a Muslim here is what I felt about Obama’s victory.
When Zizek says “that the possibility of such a thing to happen was demonstrated” what he does not take into account is how this very question was reshaped during Obama’s campaign. If we cross over from the position of observer to one of participant our perception changes radically and we see an element that is missing in Zizek’s analysis. Obama’s campaign represented not the coming to being of the impossible, but rather, in Badiou’s language, the resituating of the impossible within the language and imagery of possible.
Example: Obama fought very hard to highlight his ‘racial’ make up but in very negative way. Regardless of the real relationship between his father and him, what many people saw was the bad black/Muslim father constantly contrasted with the good/white mother. This side of him, the constant ‘talking down’ to black males, was something many African Americans felt even though they chose to ignore it (recall here Jesse Jackson’s comments). Listening to Obama speak about his parents one always gets the feeling that he would have been a much better person if he was full white.
Another way that Zizek misses the point is that he is still stuck to old notions of racism: one reduced to simply about colour. If we take colour as the founding of race we can then make all this associations between Obama and the history of slavery etc etc. However, I honestly believe racism (here see Balibar on neo-racism) no longer signifies just colour. There is also the dimension of cultural belonging, and other forms of distinguishing the insider from the outsider (Zizek here should know better as he alluded to this new aspect of racism many times in the literature). Also I should add Obama here historically has no tie of African American Slavery.
There is another dimension here of modern Western democracies that Obama is subject to. Here is what Ghassan Hage, Australian academic, has called “Phallic Democracy”. Here is a notion of modern democracy as not something people participate in but something they show as a possession against the Other, the Barbarian. This element of it is why so many progressive Americans and Westerns across the globe love Obama: he represents the fact that we ‘as white people’ can elect a black president, even though we like him because he is least black guy out of all the blacks. Here is obama as a possession, a symbol of American progress as opposed to the realisation of the impossible.
I honestly fail to see this dimension of Obama that Zizek is highlighting. Instead all I can see is how, much closer to the relationship between Thatcher and Tony Blair that Zizek discusses in many places, Obama he has occluded any possibility of meaningful difference, the impossible, within the framework of the same and the possible.
SO, IN c. 2030 WE CAN DISCUSS JFK and in 2070, WE CAN DISCUSS 2001?
ie
A Few Hundred “Paranoid” “Conspiracy Theorists” Will Be Getting Oral Tonight (and a few converts)
WASHINGTON — A secret history of the United States government’s Nazi-hunting operation concludes that American intelligence officials created a “safe haven” in the United States for Nazis and their collaborators after World War II, and it details decades of clashes, often hidden, with other nations over war criminals here and abroad.
The 600-page report, which the Justice Department has tried to keep secret for four years, provides new evidence about more than two dozen of the most notorious Nazi cases of the last three decades.
{…}
The report also examines the case of Arthur L. Rudolph, a Nazi scientist who ran the Mittelwerk munitions factory. He was brought to the United States in 1945 for his rocket-making expertise under Operation Paperclip, an American program that recruited scientists who had worked in Nazi Germany. (Rudolph has been honored by NASA and is credited as the father of the Saturn V rocket.)
The report cites a 1949 memo from the Justice Department’s No. 2 official urging immigration officers to let Rudolph back in the country after a stay in Mexico, saying that a failure to do so “would be to the detriment of the national interest.”
Justice Department investigators later found evidence that Rudolph was much more actively involved in exploiting slave laborers at Mittelwerk than he or American intelligence officials had acknowledged, the report says.
Some intelligence officials objected when the Justice Department sought to deport him in 1983, but the O.S.I. considered the deportation of someone of Rudolph’s prominence as an affirmation of “the depth of the government’s commitment to the Nazi prosecution program,” according to internal memos.
The Justice Department itself sometimes concealed what American officials knew about Nazis in this country, the report found.
The following are statements from an article in the NYT about a “terror threat” in Germany; the statements are arranged in the chronological order in which they appeared in the article. Statement #2, early in the article, explains that a suspected bomb was a “dummy” or fake… but statements that follow that continue to refer to the same “bomb” with the implicit sense that it represented a threat. The only other references to “bomb”-related events (statements #5 and #6) in the article are about false alarms.
1. One day after Germany’s interior minister said there was a concrete threat of a terrorist strike, the nation woke to reports of a possible bomb intended for an Air Berlin flight, hypercautious police forces at transportation hubs around the nation and a determined call not to let fear change the way people live.
2. By day’s end, Air Berlin said a suspicious laptop bag — identified in Namibia on Wednesday, just a few hours before the minister’s alert — did not contain any explosive material.
3. Police officials said that it had batteries wired to a clock and detonator, and that it would take several days to determine whether it could have exploded or was a false alarm.
4. Facing one of their most serious terror alerts, Germans broadly supported their government’s call to fight back by resisting fear.
5. But there was an undercurrent of concern, a permeating jitteriness, especially for law enforcement. At Berlin’s main train station, two suitcases left by an entrance were quickly surrounded by heavily armed police officers. They brought in a bomb sniffing dog and kept the public at a distance. The surprised owner returned and opened his bags, and slipped away embarrassed.
6. Two men working for the national railroad said that on Wednesday the trains stopped running for about 45 minutes because of a package found unattended at the next station. They said it contained a harmless liquid.
7. Germany’s state interior ministers met in Hamburg and issued a statement noting that there was “proof of a high degree of a security threat, both in terms of time and content.”
8. The government had been under pressure from Washington to take the threats more seriously. Officials in Berlin said they had received angry calls from a White House official, demanding stepped-up counterterror efforts — calls that were passed on to Mrs. Merkel. But Germany held to its view that the threats against it were “abstract.
9. That changed Wednesday in the hours after German officials learned that luggage screeners had found the untagged laptop bag and, scanning it, discovered the strange batteries-fuse-clock contraption.
In the following excerpt from a local English-based news-source in Germany, there is one under-emphasized statement to the effect that “US or African authorities may have been behind the dummy” device referred to (statement #2) in the article above.
Namibia ‘bomb’ turns out to be dummy
Published: 19 Nov 10 07:31 CET
The device first thought to be a bomb bound for a flight from Namibia to Germany was in fact a fake, possibly planted as a test by authorities, media reported Friday.
The laptop bag seized at the airport of the Namibian capital Windhoek on Wednesday morning contained no explosives, though it did consist of batteries connected by wire to a working clock.
Broadcaster ZDF reported the dummy may have been a test by anti-terrorism authorities to assess the readiness of the airport’s security staff, though it is unclear why the incident was then allowed to turn into a full-scale terrorism scare.
ZDF cited American security sources as saying al-Qaida did not carry out such “dry runs” and speculated that US or African authorities may have been behind the dummy. There was no evidence German authorities were involved, the broadcaster said.
Carrier Air Berlin, which delayed its flight from Windhoek to Munich for six hours while it carried out additional security checks, stressed there was no certainty the bag was supposed to be loaded onto an Air Berlin flight.
Despite the development, Germany remains on high alert because of the threat of an attack. The head of the Federal Police, Matthias Seeger, said the risk of attack was greater than ever before.
*And the dumber they think you are, the less likely they are to feel the need to actually blow something up to scare you…
UPDATE:
(CNN) — A suspicious piece of luggage that was about to be loaded onto a flight in Namibia was a “test device” from a U.S. company that tests alarm and security systems, Germany’s Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said in a news conference Friday in Hamburg, Germany.
The discovery of the bag at Windhoek Hosea Kutako International Airport in Namibia delayed flight 7377 to Munich, Germany on Wednesday and raised security concerns, a spokeswoman for the airline, Air Berlin, said Thursday.
De Maiziere said he believed the device was from a U.S.-based company, but did not know which company. He said no one was warned in advance about the test device. The bag contained a functioning electronic clock with wiring attached, but no explosives.
Was going to alert you to a BBC programme about Delia Derbyshire ( possibly gettable on I-player? ) but it was a 10 minute item on a regional round-up ( they are cleaning up tapes of her work at Manchester University ) and it was crap. More about the presenter then DD.
Our sound man who is nerd-like in extremis said that a lot of her stuff which appears to be forward looking was actually made in the 80′s so although good not quite so ground-breaking as it appears. He made a claim for Vera Gray who set up the BBC radiophonic workshop being the true unsung electronic music pioneer.
DD still sounds good is the riposte to that “I’m one step ahead of the pack” nerdery and the Portishead-before-Portishead stuff even if recorded in the 80′s was still 10 years before Portishead.
So forget the Beeb but it looks like a DD archive is going to be put up to download.
12-8-1980/ 12-8-2010: Because Saints are Notorious for Being Shitty Guitar Players
It’s about that time, again, for the culture which assassinated John Lennon to celebrate his death. A trend I’m picking up, on this 30th anniversary of the successful execution of the plot to smooth the way for the Reagan-Bush Putsch (we’re 30 years into this Reich and counting) is the “John Lennon was no Saint” Op Ed. As if anyone with more than a room-temp IQ thinks that Sainthood is Lennon’s proper selling point. Saints are notorious for being shitty guitar players.
Most of these LENNON NO SAINT texts are written, obviously, by conservative shit-dicks; but some are written by “Liberal” shit-dicks who clearly suffer from the angry guilt of someone who glances in the mirror and resents the shame of what they see and resents, by extension, the standards which shame them… the folk remedy for which, of course, is to “prove” that such standards are humanly unobtainable.
So, if John Lennon was, in fact, just a well-meaning-but-troubled popstar who couldn’t even measure up to his own purported ideals (eg, he wanted “peace” but he got into fistfights)…. the shit-dick feels somewhat absolved for being a craven collaborator in a system that no longer even bothers to pretend to blink at the culturecides and megadeaths it instigates to keep the world safe for i-phones. Not to mention the slow murder, emotional derangement and intellectual enfeeblement of its own citizens in the name of keeping the serfs disorganized and docile.
The truth is that Lennon’s importance rests on his unsurpassedly-rare (for a mega-celebrity) message: DON’T BE FUCKING DUPES. Don’t be duped by popstars. Don’t be duped by religion. Don’t be duped by governments and traditions and advertising and the community consensus.
Lennon also claimed it was immoral to drop bombs on villages but his “Give Peace a Chance” is decidedly not ironic (or evidence of hypocrisy) in light of the fact that he got into fistfights. Now, he’d have been a hypocrite if he’d dropped bombs on villages or machine-gunned women and children in rice paddies or was manufacturing napalm in vats in the attic of the Dakota. But he wasn’t, was he? No he wasn’t.
These LENNON NO SAINT pieces (which tend to scrupulously avoid sourcing the voluminous interview materials, on record, of Lennon espousing an incisive, knowing and extremely useful political philosophy, eg HERE ) are easy enough to avoid. But, owing to the magic of Facebook, I had to read one of the most irritating LENNON NO SAINT remarks, in a Friend’s comment thread, of the season. The commenter wrote:
T— G— I seem to be one of the few people who defended Albert Goldman in print. In spite of the errors in the Elvis book and especially the Lennon book — and those were some ugly warts — there was a lot of bald truth in both, truth that no one else had the gall to say. In the article above, which I read, there’s not much there that Goldman didn’t say in capital letters. Lennon was a very angry, hypocritical, cruel, pompous, extraordinarily foolish genius. Elvis was a nit-witted god. There you go.
What a stupid fucking comment… with the added irritant that it was delivered in the simulated tone of fog-cutting frankness. Putting that racist redneck retard, uh-Elvis, on a plane with the guy who wrote “Revolution” and “Woman is the Nigger of the World” and “Across the Universe”…
There is no Facebook App called KICK THAT ASSHOLE’S ASS WITH A POINTED BOOT AND HARD, MAN. I’d have used it. Instead I wrote:
Steven Seven Augustine You know, it’s a real leap from the obvious truth that John Lennon was a human, as vulnerable to accusations of being less than perfect as any of us… to writing “Lennon was a very angry, hypocritical, cruel, pompous, extraordinarily foolish genius”… even from someone who actually *knew* him, personally, for years, I’d take that as agenda-driven hyperbole in the absence of specific evidence.
Lennon was “angry” because there is plenty in this world for a conscious human to be angry about; the rest of the adjectives I’d say were standard for all of us… except the “extraordinarily foolish” bit; surely that prize goes to Paul, who, after all, married a failed, one-legged would-be porn star without a pre-nup.
WIKIDUPES (and I write that as a brief member of that poignant club)
vocabulary words: limited hangout
Your view of Julian Assange will vary according to lifestyle, but what seems remarkably constant, from the Norm Lib devotees of Huff Po to the b.o. cons who chant “Sarah 2012!”, is the assumption that the Wikileak data-dump is a genuine leak of 100% sincere data. Is anything easier to fake than digital docs? A faker doesn’t even need Photoshop skills. I guess it takes an Iranian politician to make the obvious suggestion:
Mashai: These documents are not authentic. The national interests of the United States and its allies are behind this. They see the world through their eyes, pursue their own goals, and draw the conclusions that suit their purposes.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: What are the intentions of the United States, in your view?
Mashai: America wants to portray itself as the leader of the world, as master of the destinies of nations. It wants to play off the regimes in the region against one another. It wants the world to believe that we are divided. It wants to legitimize its presence and influence in the region.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: But the diplomatic reports were published against Washington’s will and are damaging to the United States. The WikiLeaks disclosures are not a State Department PR campaign.
Mashai: Are you sure about that? How, then, did WikiLeaks gain access to the documents?
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Presumably through a US Army private who had access to a central government database and has since been arrested.
Mashai: Do you believe that? Then you must be very naïve indeed. No, the United States is behind this deliberate leak. The Americans are trying to paint the world in black and white. They underscore the differences among nations and want to show everyone that peace is only possible in cooperation with them.
How did I fall for the Assange Phenom for a few weeks, early in the year? It’s very simple (and instructive) and it’s exactly how these things work: because I wanted to. The idea that an articulate, intelligent, cool-bloodedly rational guy with Alt-Look Cred and a seemingly noble cause could seemingly fuck with the Simulocratic Hegemony itself was just too, too attractive. One guy in a new wave suit, kicking a mountain and making a very loud noise. My critical thinking went out the window.
As I wrote here, recently ( and I do like the Dewar’s-sipping Prof, in the vid, who talks like a kid being quizzed by his dad after a naughty escapade with the family station wagon, doing his best to concentrate when so few coherent thoughts seem to want to spring naturally to mind):
Steven Augustine 6 days ago
Hi Richard!
1. My comment about the Press as a manipulator of public opinion that has *never* been “objective” or “disinterested” or “noble” enough to now be said to be in “decline” is free-standing and doesn’t depend on Jay’s views or commentary for context.
2. My fundamental question about Wikileaks has yet to be answered (satisfactorily or not) by any Wikileaks believers: if Wikileaks/Assange were ever a “threat”, why were they given a platform on such a broad spectrum of the war-cheerleading MSM? They’re advertised (even lauded, in some cases) by “news” organs that run on conservative money and which can’t be more than a couple of steps removed from institutions of the government, and the War Business, itself. Until recently, Assange was moving freely across the borders of countries that are “friendly” with (ie, under the control of) the US government in order to give press conferences, lectures and interviews. I’m not asking why Assange wasn’t eliminated before he became globally famous (though I could): I’m merely asking why his efforts to “reveal” the material that he and Wikileaks have thus far dumped on us were so weakly countered by the most powerful, well-funded and effective counterintelligence entity on earth (let’s call it the CIA, though, of course, that’s a generic term like “cancer”).
If Wiki isn’t itself protected by very powerful (secret) forces or *working for* very powerful secret forces (consciously or not), how do we explain A) MSM complicity and B) this inexplicably long run of good luck at various international borders?
This discussion is held within the greater context of the most powerful and effective propaganda field in the history of the planet. Is Julian Assange “smarter” than this field? Are we?
Hero worship leads to credulity.
Thank Gawd there are a few citizen-philosophers out there who aren’t bathing in bleach-blond Kool Aid this season…
Is there real information within these intelligence dumps? Indeed, there is. The size and scope of the uploads will certainly contain volumes of real information, but which bits and when selected bits are chosen to run in a synchronised fashion across the mainstream media news cycle tells a lot about how Wikileaks is being used by the Establishment. But the real clues to the political functions of these leaks are often hidden in plain sight. Case in point: this past summer’s Wikileaks cache which featured former Pakistani ISI Chief, Hamid Gul, portraying him as an active puppet master working in cahoots with Al Qaeda and the Taliban to attack US and NATO forces in the region, was one of the clearest giveaways as to the real function and dark pedigree of the so-called intelligence pouring out of the trustworthy Icelandic online oracle. In the years running up to this supposed US ’leak’, General Hamid Gul was one of the most consistent and relentless critics of the US foreign policy and the military occupations in the region, as well as exposing its often duplicitous relationship with client state Pakistan. Gul even went so far as to accuse elements within the US intelligence structure as being either responsible or involved in the planning and execution of the infamous September 11th attacks of 2001. This of course, was a bombshell at the time and placed Hamid Gul in the crosshairs of Washington’s military and intelligence establishments. It was, after all, Gul- the old inside man in the pay of the CIA, who worked for Washington in the 1980′s to train and arm the US-backed Mujahedeen in Soviet occupied Afghanistan. The July 2010 Wikileaks file on General Gul repositioned him from whistleblower into a new member of the revised ’Al Qaeda camp’, an enemy of the state, thus priming the engines of the CIA Gulfstream Jet that could now pick up the retired Pakistani General as an enemy combatant in the War on Terror, black sack and all. From annoying insider… to demonised outsider. Job done.
and
The Business of Leaking
In the case of Washington, when real world events become difficult to manage in PR terms, a diversion is essential. The old formula of staging fake terror plots, or even real terror bombs has reached its end with the public, so what is better than combing through the Pentagon’s back catalogue of PDF files and adding a few new files for good measure, then uploading them to an off-shore server? It’s cheap, fast and best all, it’s easy to control. A junior officer could do the job. Amazingly, nowhere in any of these sinister cables appears any implications of criminal wrong doing by Herrs Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Obama or Blair. Nothing about the US funding of terror cells in Iran, 911 cover-ups, WMDs or dodgy Whitehall Dossiers. Notice the absence of any hints, implications- or international criticism of the US’s number one ally and moral/material partner in the illegal Middle East occupations- Israel. It’s pure Punch ‘n Judy, business as usual. One secret cable even-numbered Iraqi civilian deaths since the invasion at a mere 66,000- in effect revising history by rewriting previous UN and independent estimates of 1.5 million deaths. Can anyone who has followed the news over the last 7 years take this new dump seriously? So we get 250,000 ‘secret’ files dumped and the prevailing Establishment remains firmly in tact with no real change in the status quo. No change at all in US or Israeli foreign policy. Only a benign feeding frenzy for the mainstream media. A hollow Wiki. Interesting.
Just back from Amsterdam – whilst driving home from the airport ( John Lennon airport natch – nothing stranger to see when waiting for a plane than photos of the Beatles with the Mahareshi Yoga – all of them higher than any plane you’re about to board will ever get ) the car radio played news of leaks where the US diplomats were bitching about Indian government officials. However when these leaks were double checked they weren’t on any of the leaked documents
So it’s make up anything you want, pose as someone who’s read it all, say what you want safe in the knowledge that 98% of journalists aren’t going to bother to trawl through all those pages and it will get on the news.
It’s just open season as to what the leaks might say and it doesn’t even have to be a wikileak it can be any made up thing you want. As long as you look like you know what you are talking about.
Classic Global Headjob, Comrade DJ Sensei ET… it only takes a step back to get a clear overview of the confusion but most of the audience have their noses pressed against the screen with wide eyes blinking
Re: JL Airport: I hear the Chapman lounge is interesting
Luckily for today’s teens, Comrade ET, the interval of apprenticeship (before game-skills are applied professionally against Third Worlders) is getting shorter all the time
In the UK the armed forces budget is getting hacked back so some of these teens may “have” to become celebrity slayers rather than the harbingers of shock and awe upon shepherds and shop keepers.
They played a few seconds of him on the morning BBC Radio 4 news programme Today. His music shakes up any room it’s played in. An old friend of mine will be very saddened by this news.
But what on earth is the crouched figure in the photo holding? A container for his big-eyed beans from Venus? [ed.'s note: that's either a 1960s-model vacuum cleaner missing its hose or an enlarged titanium vaginophallus]
Somewhere I’m sure I still have a UK hippie/Notting Hill squatter magazine Frenz from the early 70′s with a great interview with him where he carries on his feud with Zappa who was too “sloppy” in his approach to keeping musicians in line. If I still have it and can unearth it I’ll post up some quotes. They were pretty good, he comes across like an avant-garde Patton.
Comrade DJ Sensei ET, here’s a seasonal gem for you and all the other Comrades Lurking and Meatspaced (using TET as a trove of arcane knowledge in lieu of daily posts: well done)… a found poem of ludic grace… hold on to your hats so naughty Boreas doesn’t blow them the fuck off while you’re reading this, both soul-and-lip-movingly, to Thineselves:
I think it was wise that Jesus was not to be born in the days of photography
by MOMVERA on some Yahoo thread or other (line breaks by TET)
I think it was wise that Jesus was not to be born in the days of photography
My favorite topic is Jesus Christ. I have an enlarge
photo in my living room some believe is real. It is
for me but maybe not others. It has quite an effect on anyone
who enters our home. No one ever ask who is it is. They just stare.
I think it was wise that Jesus was not to be born in the days
of photography. If you couldn’t identify with him in some way you would miss the reason for the season. I grew up
with the Latin language throughout
my childhood in both public and private schools. One said Christ
was pronounced with a hard C and one said it
was a soft C. He left a lot to ponder. The bones
of John the Baptist, his cousin, were
reportedly found and many churches
have bones of the apostles in their altars. Bones are the human
vault for your DNA and dry hard
bones last thousands of
years. Since we are genetically all over
95% the same and can recreate theoretically
how ancient DNA looked
as a live person, would you recognize John the Baptist?
It is such an exciting world we live in. Jesus left
open the door for us
to realize maybe we are wrong
about how he looked. If he stood in front
of us would we know. From what he taught, he is
in each of us which is the basis
of his religion. Wow, I best not spit
on your window on the world. I might get
a closer look at him than I can handle. But I
will definitely tell you what I see from my
window on the world. He is love for all
to try to grasp better
and better each and every day. I always
tell young people not to be in hurry to grasp
the reality of Jesus for he might figure you
are ready to see him in person. Only old people
should die because they don’t care anymore
what he looks like. They just want to make sure he comes
to get them before they get sent
the wrong way. Learning to love
is learning to live without
human form I do
believe. Like trying to fly
without a body! Ahh,
Is the above an am-dram version of Yves Klein’s “Leap into the Void”?
[ed.'s note: Group-discount Midnight Methodist Picnic Leap into the Void, Comrade ET (first photo; last photo is set on the floor of the Romanian parliament)! And a Merry Bearded, Vaguely-Levantine, Anus-Free Sky Giant's Son's Birthday to you, too!]
Btw, ET, were you responsible for this search-term in today’s incoming cache (not that there’s anything wrong with it… but it’s just not very Xmassy, is it)?
“i was adapted by black nigro mom she walk somehow naked we watch tv while open her leg i could watch in mirror her cunts story”
Steven, I just thought I’d mention this in passing. Is this the most recent World Tour that took in Berlin? I just (God help me) checked Miss B.’s webpage, which informs me that the tour took in 78 cities. So, perhaps there’s a bit of footage of your Harp Angel?
Ah, many thanks Professor M, however Beloved Wife gigged with Beyoncé on the occasion of MTV’s European Music Awards, 2009, so I doubt there’d be footage in the World Tour 2010 film… but I’ll have a peek anyway… maybe Julie Newmar’s backstage…
(ed.’s note: here’s one version of the video but the image seems reversed; also, strangely, it’s posted in August 2010, but I’m quite sure this is the 2009 performance with my Wife on the harp because it’s the one in which Beyoncé’s mask gets snagged in her, erm, hair… unless that’s part of the choreography)
President Obama likes the “U.N. Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples.” He says it can “help reaffirm the principles that should guide our future.”
The State Department added helpfully that although the declaration is not legally binding, it “carries considerable moral and political force and complements the president’s ongoing efforts to address historical inequities faced by indigenous communities in the United States.”
This declaration – which carries”considerable moral and political force,” don’t forget – contains this little gem of a paragraph, in Article 26:
“Indigenous peoples have the right to the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired,” and nations “shall give legal recognition and protection to these lands, territories and resources.”
In other words, President Obama wants to give the entire land mass of the United States of America back to the Indians. He wants Indian tribes to be our new overlords. –Bryan Fischer@afa.net (The American Family Association)
There you have it. That fucking Obama–how devious can you get? He fakes you out with his Socialist Muslim Terrorist agenda but all the time he was plotting with the evil redskins to steal America from its rightful owners. Man…that’s cold…
Comrade DJ Sensei Mishari, this is a golden opportunity to monetize this nascent meme: let’s print up a few hundred thousand t-shirts featuring Obama-as-the-joker in a native American Chieftain’s headdress and a Hitler mustache with a keffiyeh around his neck in front of a communist flag with a pink triangle inset…
"Indian Overlord" has a freshness to it, Comrade ET, doesn't it? Great band name, decent video game and very possibly the title of a BDSM classic paperback from the UK, c. 1962! ]
The paperback would have Kodachrome colour photos of couples dressed head to toe in rubber drinking tea from china cups in a suburban backyard in Pinner, Surrey. A small Yorkshire terrier would be sniffing around for crumbs in between their ankles.
No doubt there’s a vidclip advertising “rubber drinking tea” somewhere out there. and a warehouse deep in the Sonoran desert that ships the stuff to your home.
“Sonoran desert that ships the stuff to your home.” Either I don’t know where the Sonoran desert actually is or I still call camels ships of the desert or I’m channeling the works of Lee Rourke.
How the hell did someone get from that onto this site?
Rather too quick to accuse others Steven. A give away I think.
You sound under a lot of pressure at the moment. You post late at night. Given the amount of work and domestic duties you are undertaking it’s not inconceivable that a simple Google request like ” Neo-con activities in Congress” could end up as “coat of tiny scabs covering the head of my penis” at 3.00 in the morning when the eyelids stay shut longer than you intended .
In his defence he says he has been playing a lot of Bridge over the holidays so “coat of tiny scabs covering the head of my penis” may be a Bridge term for all I know.
Good Gawd, Comrade DJ Sensei Mishari, it’s funny/absurd enough as a comedy video… until you realize it’s an actual product!
And how’s this for embodying the sickness of a culture in one concise headline:
Discovery Channel: Jackson autopsy show postponed
At some point I’ll actually resume generating full-scale rants here; I’m still knee-deep in the technicolor pudding of launching my Beloved’s new musical project… we’ve added two singers (who will sing in parallel like the ladies in Sergio Mendes’ Brazill ’66) and today is the first rehearsal for the singers. Meanwhile, as a solo act, Beloved performed 21 shows this last December (twice, there were three gigs on one day) which means Offsprung and I have been building trans-galactic clay-based mud-pie factories on our own. You’d be surprised how time-consuming the latter activity can be. I informed Offsprung (5 this coming March) that there are 365 days in the year (we’ll save the leap year talk and the Mayan calendar for later) and that the day before yesterday was the end of the year (as we count these things, in Berlin) 2010. She therefore wanted to know: “So when is the world over, then?”
I didn’t have it in me to tell her the answer to that question is, according to various crypto-cabala-scholars and scientifically-inclined gnostics and bestselling authors channeling disembodied entities from all kinds of other dimensions , uh… 2012! Better learn to ride that bike soon, darling…
[ed.'s note: I was going to link a list of all the failed end-of-the-world predictions but the closest thing to a comprehensive list was this... on an odious Christer-site....]
She got home at one, eight-feet-tall in her heels and the cool fuselage of her dress and hair of burnished blades. He was watching television like a good boy when she clomped into the bedroom waving hello but not speaking as though speaking’s a kind of touch and she wasn’t in the mood but he got a bobbing erection the instant he saw her in all her pomp and nametag.
L. Beedo.
Lola unsheathed her nude glory. Breasts and hair lifted and falling as the dress went up and she clomped into the bathroom in heels and zilch else to brush and floss and mop the angel-face off then proceeded to snore and smell of soap on her side of the bed within thirty minutes of walking through the door. A record. He wouldn’t even have minded the usual missionary position and get it over with. No touching the tits, don’t mess up my hair and keep that finger away from my rectum. Poor Salter sat knees-up beside her, treated to a view of a meter of tawny back and he clutched the remote. O wretched man who craveth a fuck.
Tears.
Robbie The Robot warped and blurred, swimming in them. Salter was ostensibly watching “Forbidden Planet” (Walter Pigeon, Patrick O’Neal, Anne Francis) with the sound off and he strained to make sense of the flick through the seawater filter of his grief. The Griffin-like monster, visible only as raw energy, howled and clawed the protective field around the ship. It would have blown Salter’s mind to learn that Griffins are a symbol of monogamy. A heroic crew member with his pastels-emitting blaster was seized and ripped apart. Anne Francis with her buttery coif and the spanking sarcasm of her dotted pout startled a recognition in him for she was his genuine Sexual Ideal and he correctly pegged the futility of his sex life to her unavailability.
Snuffed the tube and the reading lamp on his side of the futon and stood up. Suddenly saw himself running across the bedroom from an impossibly distant corner, axe over his head, bringing the blade down with a scream of regret to cut his frustrating girlfriend in two but the very cartoon of it horrified him and made him sorry and love her all that much more, exacerbating his desire, which frustrated him further, which re-ignited his anger, which again made him see himself running across the bedroom from an impossibly distant corner with an axe hefted over his head, bringing the blade down with a scream of regret to cut himself in two instead.
He crept miserably into the living room with an unrequited hard-on of devilish force and he knelt milking it across the gleaming black pumps with arched backs like onyx cats stacked in a diptych of sadism and sexual snobbery under the coat hooks by the door. He lay three lengths of solder-colored semen in her $300 heels, steadying himself with a hand on the sleeve of an old coat which stood like a priest with its back to Salter’s indiscretion. Not the first time he’d fucked those shoes either.
In November of 2009 I bought a published collection of “unpublished” (surely a misnomer?) short stories by Kurt Vonnegut. I wrote, soon after reading most of it:
November 4, 2009 at 3:13 am · Edit
There’s a poignantly unsophisticated-yet-very-effective short story, by Kurt Vonnegut, in his latest posthumous collection, called “Ed Luby’s Key Club”… it’s a childish allegory of Fascism, written by a worldly man in all his jarringly optimistic grief. It’s as awkwardly lyric, and moving, as an old German woodcut. The book’s foreword is coy about when Vonnegut actually wrote these; could be vintage McCarthy era; could be vintage Bushiana.
Re-integrating Vonnegut’s aesthetic into my late-mid feel for Literary Art is an interesting challenge. It’s so much easier to re-integrate Calvino, probably because his work is in translation, for me. Vonnegut is unadulterated front-porch-on-a-Wednesday-night-in-Indiana stuff with inexplicable elements of High Style. Twain reads like Henry James in comparison; the Twain comparisons always struck me as too convenient.
Now, Dan, over at The Reading Experience, is bashing the book in terms which expose, in my opinion, the weaknesses of the academic approach to any Lit/Art/Culture which must, by necessity, do double-duty as populist product. Vonnegut’s populist origins/inclinations are spotlit in Look at the Birdie and threaten to jeopardize his already iffy position on a stool in the canon, the danger of which Dan warns us about in coded language:
Jerome Klinkowitz, perhaps Vonnegut’s most loyal defender among scholarly critics, also wonders, why this book was published, averring that “one fears that by publishing such self-apparently weak work his executors may provide ammunition for those who would discount the author’s entire legacy.” One might say that having more of Vonnegut’s work in print serves a scholarly purpose, but Look at the Birdie is clearly not aimed at a scholarly audience, and its wider dissemination could indeed lead to a diminished estimation of Vonnegut’s fiction considered as a whole, at least among those who are not already confirmed Vonnegut fans.
Who are “those who would discount the author’s entire legacy” and why should their opinions count? “Self-apparently weak” by what, and whose, metric? Who, that matters, should this “scholarly audience” matter to? What is at stake here?
Vonnegut’s work is certainly not in danger of going out of print just because some abbots of academe decide it’s impure; quite the opposite: it’s when the tonsured ones are in a rapture over jealously-guarded texts in the belfry that one has to fear for the quality (and readership) of some poor author’s afterlife. Those are the books which ever-dwindling numbers will read and which are, in turn, prized by these monks for this very quality (unreadness). Why any tonsure ever considered considering Vonnegut to be belfry material is beyond me (surely ambitious phonies like Saul Bellow are more their speed), but I suspect it didn’t hurt that one of his books was grounded in a real-world-historical event worthy of “serious” academic attention (the firestorm-bombing of Dresden). Also, Slaughterhouse Five advertised Vonnegut as a flamboyantly polite pacifist at a time when chunks of the academy considered this to be a respectable lifestyle.
Vonnegut included his own enlarged-asterisk-like drawing of an asshole in his deceptively (or genuinely, or genuinely deceptively) casual Breakfast of Champions and that should have been the tip-off to the belfry monks that Vonnegut wanted the belfry monks to fuck off. Vonnegut’s ideal audience consisted, largely, in his heyday, of literate, middle-class Lefties who’d dropped out of college. You’d have to have a little bit of a liberal arts education to appreciate the psycho-political parables in Cat’s Cradle, yet not so much education that you deemed yourself incapable of responding properly to Vonnegut’s genteel Hoosier nihilism.
Dan dismisses Vonnegut-the-short-story-writer (Kurt Minor) as a processual phase in the evolution of Vonnegut-the-novelist (Kurt Major), arguing that Vonnegut abandoned his tale-telling-tail when he finally learned to walk upright…
Most of his stories are conventionally plotted, stylistically bland, melodramatic, often sentimental. The science fiction-y stories, such as “Harrison Bergeron” and “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” are the best, but there are too few of them to compensate for the formula pieces and dull domestic dramas to be found in Bagombo Snuff Box and, especially, Look at the Birdie. For a writer whose later work challenged readers’ expectations of fiction, Vonnegut’s short stories are disappointingly tame. That he didn’t return to the form after the success of Slaughterhouse-Five suggests that he himself recognized it didn’t really suit his talents as a writer.
…but I think Dan is missing the point that Vonnegut the populist was not just evolving as a technician but changing according to his audience’s needs and in response to the evaporating market for short fiction. Dan indicates that Vonnegut outgrew “stylistically bland, melodramatic, often sentimental” fiction when it’s more likely that those qualities were what got his early stories published when a writer could live from writing fiction for magazines.
Anyone who didn’t notice a “mind-blowing” or “let-it-all-hang-out” or “psychedelic” or “post-Watergate” quality to Vonnegut’s then-current work in the respective periods during which these very qualities were also commercial attributes wasn’t paying attention. Vonnegut was a professional writer who wanted and needed to earn money by publishing books which lots of people would read. This populist/mercantile/ pragmatic consideration is too often ignored by academic critics who don’t understand the double-impact that matters of class/money have on the history of the Arts. For above-it-all Art immune to fad and fashion, look to the rich kid who can afford to create the timeless Fuck You Artifact. Or to the super-outsider, beyond all questions or constraints imposed by selling. Good old, upper-middle class Hoosier KV was neither. He was the Artistic equivalent of a highly successful Cadillac salesman.
Dan posits an evolution from Kurt Minor to Kurt Major but I’d argue that the voice remains remarkably constant and that the early sentimentality or later phantasmagoria and/or fatalism (etc) are utilitarian, market-inspired cosmetics (not to mention bodily-age-related) and that the voice is the thing. Avid readers of KV read KV for the sound KV makes in one’s head. It is, in my opinion, an inspired misapprehension of the mechanics of Kurt’s Art to write, as Dan does:
One might say that the narrator occupies his own “chrono-synclastic infundibulum,” a warp in space and time that allows a character in The Sirens of Titan, Winston Niles Rumfoord, to be everywhere all the time and to see how “all the different kinds of truth fit together.” To carry out this effect, and to create a narrative about a world in which someone might get caught up in such a thing and have access to the entire universe, requires the broader scope of a novel, and I would contend that The Sirens of Titan shows Vonnegut exploiting the formal flexibility of the novel in a way the short story–at least the kind of commercial story Vonnegut tried to write–could not sustain.
This presumes a kind of concrete (vs imposed by fiat) narrative physics that Vonnegut needed special devices to work around; this is like sitting through a movie and wondering how it’s possible to hear the voice-over emanating from the title character’s head… and coming, with a relief, to the conclusion that the character must be telepathic. There are no absolute laws. Anything is possible in the imagination of the page. Dan has needlessly rationalized an excuse for Vonnegut’s apparent narrative liberties to satisfy laws or limits which Dan himself has imposed. The myth that there is any essential or structural difference between the quality/scope/freedom/requirements of Third Person Narrative and First Person Narrative is a literal-minded idiosyncrasy of certain critics and undermines Dan’s evaluation of Vonnegut’s work. I can write:
“Magda smelled the morning’s coffee and remembered the cafe in Portugal she’d first seen Elizabeth sipping some in” or “I smelled the morning’s coffee and remembered the cafe in Portugal I’d first seen Elizabeth sipping some in” or “you smelled the morning’s coffee and remembered the cafe in Portugal you’d first seen Elizabeth sipping some in” and the mechanical differences between these sentences are nil. I can do every bit as much in one POV as I can in another, barring a bizarre compulsion to worry about simulating the physical laws of the Real World. What about First Person narrative vs Third Person narrative in a story about… talking cats? Nothing on the page is Real. Everything Is Permitted (not to be confused with an admonition that Everything Will Sell). You can make and/or “break” as many “essential” imaginary narrative rules in 1,000 words as you can in 100,000.
Perhaps there are two schools of narrative analysis: the school that frets over Roman Senators speaking with Brooklyn accents in low-budget flicks from the 50s and the school that doesn’t. This (Now) is an era, remember, in which Hollywood films of The Cat in the Hat and Where The Wild Things Are require back-stories and psychological motivational subtext because some utterly random (era-contingent) Law is violated, apparently, if the audience is simply shown an island of Wild Things, or a cat in a hat, and expected to take this state of affairs for granted.
2.
In response to Dan’s put-down of Look at the Birdie I wrote, in his comment thread:
Dan, I feel there are pleasures to be found in “Look at the Birdie” and they are pleasures unique to Vonnegut’s project and on a continuum with the pleasures he packs into his more “important” books. It’s a great advantage, as a reader, not to have to worry about Vonnegut’s reputation or the “damage” these stories might inflict on it.
The stories in LATB may or may not be thematically trivial or quotidian bits of KV’s output but they are not clumsily done; they are, recognizably, the professional work of Kurt Vonnegut. I think the draw, for anyone who genuinely enjoys the writerly voice of Kurt Vonnegut, is obvious. Having grown up not far from where KV grew up, I recognize his voice as a colossally modern, philosophically honest achievement of the unabashed Flyover.
Some writers write for/to/in-fear-of critics/posterity but Vonnegut was not that type. Kilgore Trout, who always struck me as KV dreaming himself beyond the end of all vanity/reputation/money curses, was perfectly happy to leave fresh work in public trash cans for reader(s) to happen upon and perceive in a pristine, as it were, state.
I paid €20, or so, for LATB and I don’t feel cheated. I like two of the stories (and the intro letter/essay); two well-wrought stories and a witty essay will do it for me. Anyone out there care to write two stories as entertainingly well-wrought as “Hall of Mirrors” and I will gladly pay you €20 for the pair.
The writer of “Slaughterhouse Five” is clearly the writer of “Ed Luby’s Key Club”. The latter is the allegorical expression of the worldview that went mainstream with the former: that of the Moral Atheist who doesn’t expect a prize for knowing exactly why the world will never be as good as it should be. The fluent simplicity of Vonnegut’s style is an extension of his philosophical common sense.
The fluently simplistic LATB is chock full of philosophical common sense; if philosophical common sense won’t float your boat, why bother with Kurt Vonnegut at all? An oeuvre is more than the writer’s greatest hits and hairiest breakthroughs.
Posted by: Steven Augustine | 01/05/2011 at 02:07 PM
I have also written, here on TET, about KV and this particular book,
I tend to think of Craft as a sensual, beastly, anti-intellectual henchman that runs off with the Art if it isn’t properly repressed and Uncle Kurt was damn good at using Inspiration to beat-back the particularly massive henchman of his Craft. He’s also good at proving Marty A. wrong on his hyperbolic notion of the need to boil and rake the work free of all cliché: Vonnegut makes use of cliché like the greatest 1950′s-era housewives made wondrous lunch from leftovers. KV finds a precious resource in cliché: the rhythm and tone of the voice of the “Common Man (and Woman)”. Not just marble but also cheese cloth is the stuff of Fine Art in the right hands and Kurt’s hands were right. Not that all the stories in this “new” posthumous collection suck themselves shut with the satisfying pop of the hermetic seal of genius; there’s some filler in there, too, I feel. Three or four of the stories (I especially like the one about the Romanian hypnotist) are so good they make me think it might be nice to spend more time with people who drink beer, go to church picnics and marry women with mothers named Edna. Not that any of that is in the book but the thing is rich with that feeling-tone. Go’bless Mr. Vonnegut
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Vonnegut’s populist talent in “fluent simplicity” is either the result of very hard work or a prodigious gift, but it’s there in the early stories and very few writers can pull it off (even at Kurt’s most Hoosier, the voice is more technically sophisticated than any number of Brooklyners writing in McFA cadences about AIDs, Crack and Trust Fund Anomie). The academic critics who are still interested in Vonnegut to the extent that they would “save” him for posterity by chopping his oeuvre in half and discarding the “conventionally plotted, stylistically bland, melodramatic, often sentimental” short stories remind me of George Martin’s doomed remark that The Beatles “White Album” should have been released as a much “tighter” single disc of only the very best songs.
Very few of the people who have owned and loved that album would agree.
It’s Vonnegut’s freewheeling imagination that makes him so good for me. A bit like Indian film music where no-one has told them they can’t mix a Bavarian brass band with cool 50′s vibraphone led jazz in one track so they just go ahead and do it. You’re not sure why it makes sense and hangs together but it does.
The backwards sequence in Slaughterhouse 5 fed my imagination for years.
Is Time’s Arrow any good? I rather admired Amis taking on the challenge but it’s also easy to see the limitations of a longer piece of writing based on a narrative trick.
[Christ yer on a roll, ET! has something untoward happened at home or in the tool shed today? a bump on the head, or the shock of your life-partner reading your old emails, capable of activating a dormant talent...?]
Thanks for the ‘Human Resources’ link, man. I watched the first few minutes and have now downloaded it to watch when I have a couple of spare hours of peace and quiet (2 AM). Looks absorbing…
Put on your goggles, M, secure the straps on your seat and set your Viddy Timer for 2am (though I must say that I wish now that I’d watched this, the first time, in broad fookin daylight)…
I have this tic: I see a piece of imperfect writing and want to tweak it. And so… (tweaks in bold type)…
SPEECH (à la Harold Pinter)
As many of you are aware, earlier today a number of people were attacked by an American drone in Afghanistan, including several who were meeting to fetch unclean water from a rusted barrel. We are still assembling all the facts, but we know that at least one human being who represented absolutely no threat to her professional killers was one of the victims. She is currently at a hospital in the area, and she is battling for her life.
We also know that at least dozens of people lost their lives in this tragedy. Among them were an artisan who has served his village for most of his life; and a young girl who was barely nine years old.
I’ve spoken to General David Petraeus and offered to double the resources of our mercenary forces in order to finish the job. Our deeply suspect worldview is currently ascendant, and you’ll never know what provokes our unspeakable acts. A comprehensive investigation is futile, and at my direction, an operative mentored by one of the thousands of Nazis we imported under Project Paper Clip is en route to a secret location to help coordinate our efforts to obliterate dissent. I’ve also spoken to the Democratic and Republican leaders in the House.
The Afghani woman wounded today was a friend of someone’s. She is not only a living being with the hypothetical rights and expectations conferred by birth, but she is also somebody who is worth less than zilch on our corporate-military ledgers. She is well liked by her children and well liked by her grandchildren. Her husband was slaughtered by us a week or two ago. So?
It’s not surprising that today this defenseless creature was doing what she always does — listening to the hopes and concerns of her terrified neighbors while trying to fetch unclean water from a rusted barrel in a country we’ve decided to invade, dominate and destroy. That is the essence of what our democracy is all about. That is why this is more than a tragedy for those involved. It is a tragedy for our increasingly corrupted souls and yet just another meaningless kill for our profligately barbarous, empire-building structure.
What Americans do at times of tragedy is to come together and indulge in self-congratulatory displays of faux emotion and magical thinking. So at this time I ask all Americans to join me and Michelle in keeping all the victims and their families, including the nameless Afghani washer woman, excluded from our thoughts about how noble we are. Those who have been injured, we are still gunning for them. And I know the Afghani washerwoman is as tough as they come, but I am doubtful that she’ll be able to sneeze without shitting her lungs after this one.
Obviously our hearts barely register the family members of those who have been slain unless they are white. We are going to get to the low-point of this amoral worldview, if we’re not already there. But in the meantime, I think all of us need to make sure that we’re offering absolutely no resistance to those in charge.
Don’t these things usually end with God Bless America?
I’m always appalled by how we respect the dignity of death over here but think nothing of showing the dead littered all over the road after whatever third world disaster it is this week.
Didn’t Obama win the Nobel Peace Prize? what on Earth for? Not being George W Bush is all I can think.
In which case……..
[ed.'s note: Comrade ET, I think the Nob was awarded to BO for being a... wait for it... Sexy Black Bush]
I left a comment on the Coffee House Press blog a couple of weeks ago, responding to an article the owner wrote; an uncharacteristically harmless comment, really. I know that blogs like these (in fact, the overwhelming majority of blogs), with comment-thread features, only affect to be interested in “conversation” or “debate”… what they want is lots of “positive feedback” (LOLs will do if everyone is short on time). These blogs are in place at all in order to either move actual commodities or to serve the blog-owner’s ego (or both). So I don’t, as a rule, leave comments expecting reasoned debate or stimulating virtual conversation but to seed ideas in the minds of a preciously-minute fraction of the readership, just as the occasional unexpected comments of others have, over the years, seeded ideas in mine.
Kornblum’s original post is the creation myth of his publishing house (which is one of the really prominent indie presses). It’s a fluffy article… one doesn’t, as a rule, include “controversial” material on a website dedicated to selling things (unless controversy is what’s being sold)… and my comment was a semi-fluffy counter-blurb to the effect that the leading edge of publishing is no longer on paper (even if this leading edge is largely, still, a quantity of potential energy; a placeholder for things to come).
The (extremely limited) exchange that ensued allowed me to drop an idea or two on the Coffee House Press blog that I’ve been working out recently. Kornblum may or may not have been interested in what I had to say… (laugh); a follow-up response (serious or otherwise) from Kornblum would have been nice but maybe too much of a shock, too.
3 Responses to A Couch, Spaghetti, and a Salad: How Book Fairs Brought Coffee House Press to the Twin Cities
1.
Steven Augustine says:
December 29, 2010 at 9:32 am
“But I was also inspired by the idea of the day that starting a small press was a political act, that as a small press publisher I was participating in something we proudly called, the counterculture.”
The Counterculture is alive and well in the 21st century and printing itself on virtual paper; the new twist is instantaneous, global reach. Can’t help longing for the wonderful counter-cultural readers of ’75, though… today’s reach plus yesterday’s demand would equal nirvana. Reply
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Allan Kornblum says:
January 4, 2011 at 10:11 pm
Today we have the illusion of a counterculture community through the internet, but is it real counterculture or is it just virtual?
The old counterculture contributed to the end of the war in Vietnam, and launched the environmental movement, the feminist movement, the gay rights movement, and more. We not only wrote and published, we put our feet on the ground and got some things done. I’d like to see the current counterculture do more than share entertaining videos.
Of course my response may just be the result of impending geezerdom. And the feeling of unity that seemed to energize the counterculture of the 60s and 70s may have only been an illusion. But if so, damn, it sure was a sweet illusion. Reply
2.
Steven Augustine says:
January 6, 2011 at 6:11 pm
“Today we have the illusion of a counterculture community through the internet, but is it real counterculture or is it just virtual?”
Good question… I think the answer has to be mixed. (Plus: I was thinking more of a literary avant garde than a political movement but I’ll bite! laugh)
The problem with tallying the achievements of the “old counter culture” against those of the “new counter culture” is somewhat like old baseball stats vs modern ones (but in reverse)… in an alternate universe in which winning teams actually get to alter the rules of the game.
On many levels, The Present is the dire result of a battle that was *lost* very soon after the last of the victories you cite… the first symptom of this loss would be Reagan’s inauguration.
In an America that has moved so far to the Right that Al Gore (remember his book-burning wife?) is considered a *Liberal Icon* and the economy has everyone obsessed with not becoming homeless, from what quarter might Replacement Radicals come? Radical Consciousness in the West (ie, not contemplating the using of torches and pitchforks to kill the landowners but conceptualizing within the paradigm of “changing the system from within”… a very middle class approach) requires the luxuries of time to think and freedom from existential pressure (which breeds the requisite amount of foolhardy confidence… and I don’t use that phrase disparagingly).
And there’s the New Materialism to consider: it was pretty easy to reject the mainstream, as a high school senior, back in 1966, when the most seductive things Society had to offer were sex-on-demand (ie, marriage) and color TV: rebels ‘n radicals could find better sex *outside* of marriage and better TV in the form of illicit drugs. Now, however, Mainstream Society itself is the purveyor of full-spectrum toys and pleasures and “dropping out” means ascetic self-sacrifice (and zero popularity among the hottest “chicks” and “dudes”).
It’s as though God stole all the Devil’s best tricks after *finally* realizing that the chocolate-covered carrot works much better (except in extreme circumstances) than the stick.
When even self-proclaimed Lefties won’t dare to criticize “our troops” (they are, after all, not drafted but voluntarily sign up to shoot at third world villagers who haplessly run afoul of US Foreign policy) and the death of a son or daughter in active duty can mean a sort of jackpot payout to grieving families, where’s the necessary rhetorical heat and outrage-momentum supposed to come from?
I think the useful modern political epiphany has to be that *substantive change* (vs the fake version that Clinton and the current POTUS sold) will have to be a generational project.
It’s great that legal Civil Rights for “minorities” and Women sneaked through before the gate slammed down (though those gains are by no means impervious to roll-back), but I don’t think that, at any point in the past few centuries, the Progressives were in charge! (laugh)
As for the *literary* counter-culture (which I happen to think is thriving): in texts begin our dreams of responsibility… Reply
If I have the time in the next few weeks I’ll develop one or two of the ideas I touched on in my lonesome impromptu editorial….
Today (or soon, I guess; I’m always foggy about Easter and Labor Day, too), Whitey Americans of a Liberalish persuasion celebrate the birth of The One Darky We Wouldn’t Be Afraid To Be Alone In An Elevator With… MLK. Whether or not Darky-Americans would have won the socio-legal battle to be considered “human” in North America without MLK‘s efforts is hard to say. The U.S. was parka-deep in The Cold War 1.0, back then, and the government was on its best behavior, winning those hearts and minds. You couldn’t very well try to sell the rest of the planet on the wonders of the Ameerican Vay of Loif (as I have heard a mulleted German refer to it) while treating 10% of your own human population like donkeys and/or fairground attractions, now, could you?
As if to booby-trap the rhetorical question posed above, now that Cold War 1.0 is over and America is no longer on its best behavior, Darky-Americans have, indeed, reverted, largely, to their inherited roles as donkeys and/or fairground attractions. Perhaps this is also, slightly, down to the fact that no MLK (or Darky of his ilk) is any longer with us. Which is, as we know, no accident.
MLK was terminated because he went from being a harmless, golden-throated advocate of Human Rights in North America, to being a vociferous critic of the South East Asian War (ie, an advocate of Human Rights outside of America); he died by ratcheting the rhetoric up too many notches and being in a position to make the rhetoric effective. Ironically, his counterpart (The Rolling Stones to MLK’s Beatles), MX, died from the very opposite: for ratcheting the rhetoric down too many notches. MX began calling for the unity of all Serfs, of all colors, wandering dangerously away from his “White Devils” shtick.
The lesson in both assassinations being that it’s not what a World Figure says or does, per se, that gets one in lethal trouble with the Empire. The real mortal no-no is violating the Faustian terms and conditions of one’s contract. Which is just so fucking unprofessional. For example: John Lennon was finally assassinated for doing exactly the kind of thing that “radicals” like Tom Hayden still do (albeit rather feebly) to this day. But Lennon wasn’t given the World Fame Pill to act like anything other than a decadent, self-absorbed Pop Star, just as MLK wasn’t given his World Fame Pill to do anything other than make the US government look nobly tolerant while keeping his followers infinitely mellow and smilingly patient in an other-worldy, Joan-Baez-or-Mahalia-Jackson way. MX‘s World Fame Pill was administered to him, of course, to keep the White Devils of the Flyover deeply frightened…. the job inherited by Fiddy. Or whoever they are this year. And while we’re at it: are we sure we know why Muhammad Ali hasn’t been able to mumble a meaningful (or coherent) sentence in nearly thirty years…?
There will be many high-minded speeches/editorials today and some are certain to use one of two phrases (if not both) trademarked by MLK: “I Have A Dream” and “The Promised Land”. And someone, somewhere (in the NYT or the Pittsburgh Gazette or on a blog about the 1960s) will get off a bittersweet riff to the effect that Darky-Americans haven’t quite made it to that Promised Land; that MLK might be terribly disappointed in the extent to which this Mosaic goal is further from realization than ever. That The Promised Land is still somewhere across de fucking River Jordan or over a mountain or however the squares love putting it. The real point of my speech being that such an assertion is absurd. It’s wrong.
1. Paradox in a theory is a sure sign of error or incompleteness
2. To sense the world is to enter it; to read the world is to be entered
3. The page is the first screen; the wall is the first page; the window is the first cinema
4. Reading is closer to eating than thinking: thinking is closer to digging a shred of chicken from between your molars with your tongue
5. A philosopher is a novelist who doesn’t know how to make the words more interesting
6. Writing is divination; reading is the prediction come true
7. Academic writing has the same quality, whether it’s translated or in the original: a halting imprecision as a direct result of the inability to control the temptation to avoid the trap of leaving oneself open to being proven wrong
Those Too-Loose-To-Rock (or ‘The Teapot’ as the tarts of Montmartre fondly referred to him) pix are eye-stretching…but is it Art? Or is it only Art if he cans the turds? Nah…I don’t buy that…the Act is the Art. Man crapping on beach is just a man crapping on the beach; T-L crapping on the beach is a statement…no? I dunno…I’m confused.
I’m going to go and have a crap in A. The National Gallery, B. The Tate Gallery and C. on someone’s front lawn. Then I’m going to assess the impact–aesthetic, moral and political–and get back to you.
described as "Two-way mirror structure, stainless-steel, toilet unit,concrete floor, aluminum, fluorescent lights, 250cm x 140cm x 190 cm" and first shown outside the Tate]
1. My own little apothegms, M, my own; you’re asking yourself why I’m not rolling in the proceeds from t-shirt sales, yes…?
2. It was a friend of Teapot’s who documented the doo (and its doing)… I’ll have to track down the source to recall the chum’s name…
(I was going to decorate your comment with a little something from int’l Art colossi Gilbert & George but I don’t have the stomach for it, as it turns out…. prefer to post nude black chicks in this part of the thread)
Seriously, you could become the ‘interesting t-shirt’ king. A million students are itching to give you money, man. Don’t let them down.
I hope you don’t mind if I use that T-L image. It’s set off a train of thought (or what passes for thought north of my eyebrows) that I want to tease out and post. I wish I knew more about the photo…oh,well…google, here I come.
[ed.'s note: “I hope you don’t mind if I use that T-L image.”
Now that would be good for a chuckle and a sneer… if I “minded”… wouldn’t it? Shameless image thief, me]
those Gilbert & George turds are enormous when you see the actual pictures, some of them the height of a person. Even considering the size of them they are quite good at sneaking them into compositions.
I find their world-view rather vile but I saw a retrospective of theirs years ago and it was pretty impressive stuff in terms of visual imagery. Like stained-glass windows done by a couple of weirdoes. Apparently they are quite charming in real life. They live off Brick Lane in London so presumably not too far from our PH blogmeister. One of them is apparently married! I know I thought the same.
Incidentally I re-visited the drawings on TET 6.0 and realised I’d never really thanked you for doing such a good job of putting them up there. Mea culpa etc.
[ed.'s note: always thought G&G would make excellent villains in a hip kid's fairytale filmed by Jeunet et Caro]
1. “One of them is apparently married! I know I thought the same.”
Erm.. uh… why, whatever do you mean…?
2. All the thanking is mine to do, Comrade
3. Don’t forget Freddy Mercury was “married”, too… whatever it is I’m trying to say with that (and I suppose you’re going to tell me that Pierre et Gilles just had a bad breakup with Pamela Anderson… )
On the human scale (ie, roughly drawing-sized… anything that would fit through a normal doorway) we anticipate a message. On an industrial scale we switch to a level of contemplation below the philosophical one we affix to the natural and titanic… clouds, mountains, rivers, stars… but above the human scale of message. And what level of contemplation is that, then, between the two scales, where Big Ticket Art and Architecture hover? I think we can call it Intimidation.
Starring, again, the ultra-macho Tony Randall. Erm… are *you* married, Comrade ET…?
[ed.'s note: It's been pointed out to me that I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about; I somehow confused Randall's star-vehicle, "The 7 Faces of Mr. Lau", with Seuss' "The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T". Sincere apologies for any confusion or life-changing screen damage this mistake on my part may have caused]
Seconded. We’d have skipped the ritual (where quasi-Christian magical thinking meets the file-cabinet-kitsch of The State) completely if not for all kinds of international inconveniences otherwise. I’ve written elsewhere that the humorless teuto-prick who officiated over the ceremony nearly found his asshole gripping my ankle…
Daughter made the mistake of asking me a question while Herr Eisenmushi was roboting his way through the spiel so the fucker actually interrupted his incantation to say “This is very annoying!” I got my daughter quiet and with masterful timing, my wife-in-becoming’s cell phone went off. In a room full of humans this would have brought titters. We got this instead: “Listen, I’m very close to calling this off!” verbatim (in the Fathertongue, of course).
Not for nothing is the German Civil Servant feared. They can’t be fired. They stamp your fucking life-or-death documents. Piss one off at your peril. Had the pleasure of saying “N- – i” under my breath as we evacuated the chamber.
It’s the short German one that’s married. These are my limitations and prejudices coming to the fore obviously but there’s nothing about him that would remotely suggest marriage material to a woman.
Done no doubt for a residence permit/ UK passport,
When I lived in London at the end of the 70′s I used to drink in a local pub with about 10 brothers from a large Irish family who regularly married Moroccan women for cash. I went to one of the weddings as I could speak passable French which was the only European language the family had and the groom couldn’t speak it.. A gang of Irish builders at one end of the registry office with ill-fitting suits and plaster on their boots and a respectable well-dressed and rich Moroccan family at the other end.
The man who conducted the “wedding” had to turn a blind eye to virtually every detail of the event. It’s not every wedding that ends with a handshake, an envelope of cash and where the groom goes back to work whilst the bride goes off with her boyfriend.
[ed.'s note: Immediately after marrying my first wife, I did, in fact, go off on a date with my lover (the Persian girl)... but that was another sort of thing (and, in any case, if any cash had been exchanged it should have flowed in my direction, for the Green Card the venal harpy, who I really slept with in a conjugal bed and everything, off and on for 13 years, eventually got out of it).
Marriage number 2 (the Eternal One) was more conventional: our 4-year-old daughter was the sole witness]
It’s like some hilarious deadpan set-up from a hip hybrid of vintage SNL and second-season Monty Python…. the host’s worshipful introduction (the interviewee’s list of works and accomplishments; the closeup of his Lincolnesque visage)… the perfect timing of the cut, at 1:31, to… Mr. Lilly’s preposterous fucking appearance…
(if I’d seen this at the age of 16, would I have pored, with quite such painstaking zest, over Programming and Metaprogramming the Human Biocomputer (a book I still own my original copy of)….?)
Steven Augustine January 22, 2011 at 1:38 pm | #19
Reply | Quote
The debate is a red herring; immigrant-irritants are *deliberately* imported and stored, by governments all over the world, as political potential energy (or panic buttons). I can speak to this issue as an expat who has lived in Europe (UK, Sweden and then Germany) for a total of 20 years.
When Merkel, in Germany, noted the supposed “failure” of immigrants to “integrate”, the question that should have been put to her was, “Shouldn’t we worry about integrating the German Proletariat first?”
Merkel first poo-poohed the rudely anti-immigrant Thilo Sarrazin (still can’t get over the delicious irony of his family name) but quickly about-faced and jumped on the rotten bandwagon after noting the fact that Sarrazin’s immigrant-bashing bestseller was just flying off the bookshelves. With experienced decoding, the antipathy and disgust on display in all this reveals itself as nothing but standard contempt of the Bureaucrat Class for anything under it: all along, the working/ unworking class in Germany has been living a parallel, separate-but-nominally-equal existence perfectly analogous to that of the “immigrants” who have never, since being invited to help rebuild after the war, been also invited to join “society”. But there’s no political advantage to be gained in bashing poor “white” natives, so…
The hypocrisy on display during these cyclical wog-hunts (which, eerily, match neatly to downturns in the economy) is always breath-taking. And “Multi-Culturalism” is a meaningless term, in the 21st century, in that “Mono-Cultures” are impossible.
Listen to the profoundly human quality of the rage and grief in that voice; also note the perfect joke in DR’s cheapness (flying commercial!) exposing him to this moment. More importantly, the heroic youth in this video shows the way forward: he expresses not only outrage at the filthy old beast but revulsion. He’s transcended the shackles of his conditioning. Or maybe (even more incredibly) he’s a Pure: never conditioned in the first place. But that’s why “we” find it so difficult to deal with these Plutocratic Plutonians… “we” envy them, “we” admire them, “we” want their approval. That’s the Primal Trick; the Auto Necrotic Asphyxiation; the Psycho-Serfdom clause in the social contract (how do you think they controlled hundreds of slaves at a time, on the good old plantations, with mere handfuls of crudely-armed overseers? The slaves were/are in love with Massa). Get in touch with your Edenic Nausea, Comrades! Let this 17-year-old lead the way…
The only sane, logical, clear-eyed and non-duped reactions to the ridiculous Tucson Narrative I have thus far read emanate exclusively from wacko nutjob paranoid conspiracy websites. Certainly not a jot of useful, un-duped, laser-eyed analysis is coming from the HackAcademic Left, despite the fact that this latest event will, without a doubt, open the gulag door for the next plague of draconian measures. Let’s not forget that it was the dubious fizzle of an underwear bomb which heralded full-body scanning (and unsanitary junk-jiggling) at the airport. Soon to be coming to your banks, cinemas, kindergartens and grocery stores.
Intellectual Snobbery is inhibiting the kind of cross-demographic info-sharing we could genuinely do with right now. A highly-esteemed colleague on my Facebook has posted something about Rosa Luxemburg today but has yet to say anything about the Tucson Narrative that strays beyond the MSM-shepherded conversation (ie, all Palin-and-or-gun-control-oriented). How is Rosa Luxemburg more worthy of contemplation than the creepy machinations of the here and now? Are serious thinkers only interested in topics decorated with the requisite patina of age? And is the allure of this patina in its glamor or its relative safety?
I have a dear friendship of 30-years’ standing with a scholar for whom the romance of the October Revolution of 1917 is one of the chief ordering motifs of his life; however, just try discussing the synchronicity of the connections between Mark David Chapman and John Hinckley Jr with him. Trotsky this, Trotsky that: fine… but John Lennon was our Trotsky and his assassination deserves some intellectual attention. One would think that Historians might be interested in our direct inheritance of the ripples, repercussions and recapitulations of the long-past “world events” they are meant to study. They can’t really believe that the Caligula’s, Gilles de Rais‘, John Browns and Gavrilo Princips were all one-offs and/or epiphenomenal.
Just as it suddenly became not only acceptable but de rigueur for academics to turn their deconstructive urges on Pop (The Dark Knight was quite a fave on Yakkademic blogs like The Valve; and Camille Paglia just loves her some Billy Collins and Anna Nicole Smith), why not drop the class-erected firewall on Politics? Allowing the Political Class (and its butlers, The Pressand Academe) to define (and broker discussions on) Politics is tantamount to letting the Mafia define, and administrate the narrative on, Crime. The hoi polloi have more to offer than graphic novels and street art: why not check out what they’re doing with Conspiracy Theory…? Because Conspiracy Theory is now the Enlightened version of the Vernacular discussion of Politics.Some daring public intellectuals (Michael Parenti is a great example) have already crossed over. It’s a brave new territory. Plenty of room for niche-carving.
The Evil Right (I include Republicrats and Demoblicans alike in that category) have their think-tanks, acronym’d spook clubs and whatever else they have organized with unlimited funding and the unprincipled intellectual talent they manage to siphon off the top of Harvard, Yale, Cornell and MIT (et al) every year… what does the Flummoxed Left have? In a collective or aggregate sense? Nader’s Raider’s?
There is surely a surfeit of mind-fucking conspiracy unsense smeared all over the Net. Obviously. I may never stretch my sensibilities to a capacity capable of reading about “shape-shifting Reptilians” without rolling my eyes (or even to the point of bothering to read the stuff at all)… but it is as a result of very pointed conditioning that we consider such nutty theories to differ, not by degree but by category, from the hallucinatory propaganda that would have us believe that we are mutilating Iraqis and Afghanis in order to bring them democracy or that the Pres and his minions and masters give a fuck about all the little people who form the heap the top of which they waltz upon. In other words: 80% of everything you read, watch and hear is molten bullshit, whether a talking head in a suit and a glue-on haircut told it to you or a ranty huffer in a trailer park hammered it out on a taco-smeared keyboard at 3am. One is fecal, the other is fecal with a ribbon around it.
The fact remains that not only does the suit not make the woman or man… it has zero bearing on the validity of his or her data.
There is a grassroots roar of clear-eyed, well-researched (yes, that’s what I said) opinionation out there and it has been assembled by the closest thing to a corporate Thinktank or a CIA that you will find on the non-fascist bank of the river of sensibilities: call it the CFI. The fact that this unofficial bureau of Collective Folk Intelligence appears, often, to keep company with nastier, wackier, unverified crap should not be daunting if we, again, merely take a closer look at the nasty, wacky, unverified crap that we’ve been swallowing from the Dan Rathers and Cokie Roberts’ and Mike Wallaces we’ve all grown up with. Pick-and-choose was always the paradigm if you weren’t a total dupe, no…? It’s a matter of sifting.
I read the following comment about the sloppily-done Passion Play in Tucson from a “regular joe” and the justice and sweet reason of it encouraged me; this is not from the “well-researched” category… this is from the category of “I am from the planet Earth and am familiar with the behavior of actual humans”:
“It’s a small point, I know. But, when you watch it you’ll notice the dubiously injured Suzi Hileman nearly jumps out of her seat screeching, and then “BAM”. Afterward she and CG are on the ground, she bleeding and wounded apparently, CG “undamaged”.
“Well, it would seem to me, to be believable she would have heard quite a few “BAMs” as they were reported near the end of the line, before falling wounded. In her getting lost in her tale she seems to forget for a moment that she is not the center of the story.
“Though shot in the chest, and in her gut, with a hip shattered and a thigh possibly hit, she is screaming, “Don’t you die on me!!” “Don’t you leave me girlfriend!!”
“She relates how they are eyeball to eyeball while lying on the ground, which is rather problematic with her many statements of they were holding hands while standing in line. CG would only have been up to her waist when standing.
“A medic comes over and says ” Ma’am your bleeding.”
“She pops back with a comment worthy of John Wayne.
It is cringeworthy throughout.”
My Advanced High School Physics teacher drilled into my head the wisdom that there is no such thing as a stupid question. Or questioning. Don’t be afraid that the rest of the class will snicker if you raise your hand to express a doubt about something that every 9-year-old takes for granted.
COMING SOON: And What Does Joan Didion Have To Do With All This…?
Just occurred to me that many of Britain’s ’60s male pop icons were shrimps owing to WWll food-rationing; now, if we can link fetal nutrition with complex gender inflection, we can attribute Glam Rock to the same historical influence…)
What’s interesting watching the final concert of Ziggy Stardust at the Rainbow is how out of kilter the band is to Bowie. They remind me of pop contemporaries the Sweet – lads who saw an opening ( stop it! ) in dressing up in lurex and glitter and who went for the look rather than the lifestyle.Bowie on the other hand appears to be in another imaginative universe. I could imagine that if he’d been a Noo Yawker that the band would be living the androgynous life too.
I’m not a massive fan – his voice like Jagger’s really grates on me – but can admire from afar.
Interesting as well in that film to see all those exotic costumes being put on in a shit-hole British 70′s backstage dressing room and watching Bowie dressed as an intergalactic cyber-geisha drinking tea out of a polystyrene cup. To rehydrate shouldn’t he be re-absorbing his body fluids through interstellar osmosis…..or something?
“Interesting as well in that film to see all those exotic costumes being put on in a shit-hole British 70′s backstage dressing room and watching Bowie dressed as an intergalactic cyber-geisha drinking tea out of a polystyrene cup.”
Which even DB himself noted (in reference to the slickened glam of that disappointing Velvet Goldmine flick); the “movement” came out of equal parts trash bin and boredom. There are always cast-off citizens just crying to be claimed by Leper Messiahs and then semi-validated when the mainstream catches up (just ask Bette Middler or that GaGa thingy). My only “problem” with DB himself is that people want to treat the package as High Art when it’s just, in the end, great fun (if it’s great fun for you). Well, no: I take that back, a little. Scary Monsters is a fairly prescient political statement. Otherwise, was Bowie ever as good, in a serious way, in his various aspects, as the people he famously ripped off? Scott Walker was a better singer, Jacques Brel was a better songwriter, Little Richard a more flamboyant Queen, Burroughs an edgier conceptualist and, you know… Marcel Marceau…
But Bowie had the Aryan Alien look down pat and you can’t beat that in the arena of postwar media myth-making! (the only minority group that features in more films than either Nazis or Extraterrestrials do would have to be Vampires… and he even played one of those, once..)
(Just Googled “Jacques Brel” to double-check that it’s a single “L” and discovered this: “Canadian Terry Jacks’ version of “Seasons in the Sun” became a global pop hit in 1974, topping the charts internationally.” That was written by Jacques Brel? Next you’ll be telling me that Bowie almost co-wrote “My Way”…)
PS Comrade ET: did you come in on the following search term, culled from the cache…?
“edward taylor poet”
Meanwhile… along those lines…erm… (re)name this tune:
Sir M! The Lennon-Trotsky comparison is more about the grass-is-always-greener (or redder)-in-other-totalitarian-regimes attitude than any real parallels between Trotsky’s life and Johnny’s… though Johnny was, neatly, born a couple of months after Trotsky’s exit. But why all the attention paid to Leon’s assassination, by our Lefty yakkademics, and so little to Johnny’s? No intellectual vigor spent on all those jarring “lone gunman” discrepancies in Chapman’s case, but, imagine (or Imagine) if it had been claimed that Ramón Mercader was merely a nut obsessed with Trotsky’s fame?
I wonder how many Left-leaning intellectuals who still mourn, to this day, the political murder of Rosa Luxemburg, contemplate the political murders and near-murders which appeared to cluster in that spooky season which stretched from shortly before, to shortly after, Reagan’s inauguration? It was not so very long ago at all. And the only place I’ve seen anyone mention the irregularities surrounding Reagan’s botched butchering (the super-long ride to the hospital; the weird little razor-thin disc that had entered in a slit between his ribs; Hinckley’s close connection to the Bush family) was in Kitty Kelly’s biography. And, of course, the nutjob wacko bigfoot conspiracy sites which reference Kelly’s research.
How many of these guys who can go into the ins-and-outs of Stalin’s counter-revolutionary perfidies are also aware of the fact that a guy named Raymond Lee Harvey (couldn’t make it up) was arrested under suspicion of attempting to off Jimmy Carter before the 1980 election? What about peacenik Marley’s attempted assassination and eventual untimely death in 1981? Is the story about Carl Colby’s just-prior-to-that visit of Bob true? Is there a tenured academic in America who will bother wondering?
I wonder if Rosa Luxemburg focused her energies on safely distant and glamorous historical matters like the assassination of Abraham Lincoln… or if she was focused on concerns a little closer, for her, to home? Liberalish Thinkers don’t seem to get the inherent poignance in cheering “regime change” (or its false alarms) during hopeful photo-ops in Iran (a couple of years back) and now in Tunisia and Egypt… as though oppression, like a quantity in physics, operates on some rule of force in which the intensity accelerates as a function of time and distance. It’s too much to expect ambitious and/or tenured thinkers to hit the barricades with Molotov cocktails in Georgetown or Berkeley the next time the centurions taser some innocent fucker to death, but couldn’t they at least pay some lip service to the fact that tyranny is not finished with us nor simple in its guises and goals and is just as likely to be White, Western and Now?
World-famous Pop singers are Politicians; would anyone argue that disgraced candidate John Edwards was, at any point, more powerful and influential than John Lennon? Lennon espoused his own semi-Situationist platform (constituted of evolving components from the bigger-than-Jesus riff to the anti-war stuff and the liberationist super-slogans like Imagine and Woman is the Nigger of The World)… would any experienced adult argue that Edwards or Romney or Hillary or any of those fuckers stand for anything more than getting and keeping power? A principled politician gets a target on her/his heart. Lennon was a principled politician.
Lennon’s late-period songs were his political speeches and they repeat over and over in our heads; people will remember passages from Instant Karma or God long after they’ve forgotten Obama’s boilerplate rhetorical flourishes. Bush had his “thousand points of light” and Reagan had his “surly bonds of earth”… are these more substantive than “God is a concept by which we measure our pain?” Isn’t “Imagine there’s no hunger” just as famously evocative as “I had a dream”?
When a guy with that much ground-level political power is killed in San Salvador (Bishop Romera, 1980, say) or Nigeria, the Commie Hackademics address themselves to the matter and see right through it. Or when there’s a brown guy who hasn’t done much beyond being the victim of a miscarriage of justice, they wear t-shirts that say Free Leonard Peltier or Free Mumia. How about a few high-profile Lefty Thinkers wear t-shirts saying Who Killed Lennon?
That’s what I meant by that, M. Our Leading Thinkers are daydreaming pussies.
Yeah, sorry about that. For some reason (that I suspect you may be more au fait with), the majority of my vids are ‘blocked in Germany’.
Why Germany? Very annoying but if you just go through a proxy server you should have no problem. I was especially looking forward to your daughter’s reaction because this track seems to provoke universal pleasure: everyone I’ve ever played it for–from my kids in their infancy to their great-grandparents–loves it.
I was curious to see if my theory (such as it is, i.e. that this tune transcends age, race, class etc. in its ability to tickle the pleasure centres) would hold. Mind you, I expect you have a copy of this somewhere anyway… [ed.'s note: if it's in the boxed set, I have it... now, where is that boxed set...?]
No intellectual vigor spent on all those jarring “lone gunman” discrepancies in Chapman’s case, but, imagine (or Imagine) if it had been claimed that Ramón Mercader was merely a nut obsessed with Trotsky’s fame?
Interesting point and I have to say mea culpa. I’m as guilty as Joe Six-Pack of making easy assumptions based of information filtered through the bland, sausage-making machine that is the capitalist media.
I catch myself doing it and chide myself for intellectual (and probably moral) laziness. I should take the advice I give my children more seriously: question everything. Who is saying what? What is their agenda? What is their real agenda? Cui bono? Etc etc…
“I’m as guilty as Joe Six-Pack of making easy assumptions based of information filtered through the bland, sausage-making machine that is the capitalist media.”
I find that being as cynical as humanly possible at all times (except while feeding my daughter or giving my wife a neck-rub) is the safest setting, M. People mistakenly believe that cynicism is some sort of fun-dampener, soul-shriveler or quality-of-life-reducer. Oh, no, far from it: it’s a 24-hour party, eight days a week, in this skull. No more nasty shocks or let-downs. Harvey Keitel and Dennis Hopper are (were) both staunch conservatives, you say, and Gandhi and Nico were racists and Walter Cronkite was an habitué of Bohemian Grove and Vlad screwed around on Vera before writing a laudatory note to LBJ? Such news has lost its youthful power to wound me.
Re: Cui bono… or, in the case of Irishmen in Liberace glasses and cowboy hats: quare Bono
Steven but what you describe is not real cynicism. I figured most of that out too except the Gandhi accusation but I’m not sure what angle you are taking so I’d need more info on that one.
Real cynicism ( to follow on from your examples ) is when you can’t feed your daughter and forget what shit life can serve up at the same time, when you’re checking your watch when rubbing your wife’s neck.
I’d say you’re a dualist – able to enjoy life whilst not blind to its crapness at the same time. A cynic only goes in one direction surely? ( don’t call me shirley etc.etc. )
I’m not attempting to polish your edges here but having had experience with a grade A cynic when younger I never detect the monotonous defensive blinkered world-view that a cynic serves up on these threads.
Shirley, the “cynic” line was a joke, Comrades DJs ET and M, but the Gandhi jab is laid out very nicely here (excerpted from the place I first discovered it, years and years back).
Addressing a public meeting in Bombay on Sept. 26 1896 (CW II p. 74), Gandhi said:
Ours is one continued struggle against degradation sought to be inflicted upon us by the European, who desire to degrade us to the level of the raw Kaffir, whose occupation is hunting and whose sole ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy a wife with, and then pass his life in indolence and nakedness.
In 1904, he wrote (CW. IV p. 193):
It is one thing to register natives who would not work, and whom it is very difficult to find out if they absent themselves, but it is another thing -and most insulting -to expect decent, hard-working, and respectable Indians, whose only fault is that they work too much, to have themselves registered and carry with them registration badges.
In its editorial on the Natal Municipal Corporation Bill, the Indian Opinion of March 18 1905 wrote:
Clause 200 makes provision for registration of persons belonging to uncivilized races (meaning the local Africans), resident and employed within the Borough. One can understand the necessity of registration of Kaffirs who will not work, but why should registration be required for indentured Indians who have become free, and for their descendants about whom the general complaint is that they work too much? (Italic portion is added)
The Indian Opinion published an editorial on September 9 1905 under the heading, “The relative Value of the Natives and the Indians in Natal”. In it Gandhi referred to a speech made by Rev. Dube, a most accomplished African, who said that an African had the capacity for improvement, if only the Colonials would look upon him as better than dirt, and give him a chance to develop self-respect. Gandhi suggested that “A little judicious extra taxation would do no harm; in the majority of cases it compels the native to work for at least a few days a year.” Then he added:
Now let us turn our attention to another and entirely unrepresented community-the Indian. He is in striking contrast with the native. While the native has been of little benefit to the State, it owes its prosperity largely to the Indians. While native loafers abound on every side, that species of humanity is almost unknown among Indians here.
Nothing could be further from the truth, that Gandhi fought against Apartheid, which many propagandists in later years wanted people to believe. He was all in favour of continuation of white domination and oppression of the blacks in South Africa.
In the Government Gazette of Natal for Feb. 28 1905, a Bill was published regulating the use of fire-arms by the natives and Asiatics. Commenting on the Bill, the Indian Opinion of March 25 1905 stated:
In this instance of the fire-arms, the Asiatic has been most improperly bracketed with the natives. The British Indian does not need any such restrictions as are imposed by the Bill on the natives regarding the carrying of fire-arms. The prominent race can remain so by preventing the native from arming himself. Is there a slightest vestige of justification for so preventing the British Indian?
Here is the budding Mahatma telling the white racists how they can perpetuate their Nazi domination over the vast majority of Africans.
In the British imperialist scheme, one important strategy was to divide and rule. Gandhi advised Indians not to align with other political groups in either coloured or African communities. In 1906 the coloured people in the colonies of Good Hope, the Transvaal and the Orange River colony, addressed a petition to the King Emperor demanding franchise rights. The petitioners showed clearly that, in one part of South Africa, namely the Cape of Good Hope, they had enjoyed the franchise ever since the introduction of representative institutions.
Commenting on the petition, the Indian Opinion of March 24 1906, declaring that “British Indians have, in order that they may never be misunderstood, made it clear that they do not aspire to any political power,” added:
It seems that the petition is being widely circulated, and signatures are being taken of all coloured people in the three colonies named. The petition is non-Indian in character, although British Indians, being coloured people, are very largely affected by it. We consider that it was a wise policy on the part of the British Indians throughout South Africa, to have kept themselves apart and distinct from the other coloured communities in this country.
In a statement made in 1906 to the Constitution Committee, the British Indian Association led by Gandhi (CW. V p.335) said:
The British Indian Association has always admitted the principle of white domination and has, therefore, no desire, on behalf of the community it represents, for any political rights just for the sake of them.
Commenting on a court case, the Indian Opinion of June 2 1906, in its Gujrati section, stated:
You say that the magistrate’s decision is unsatisfactory because it would enable a person, however unclean, to travel by a tram, and that even the Kaffirs would be able to do so. But the magistrate’s decision is quite different. The Court declared that the Kaffirs have no legal right to travel by tram. And according to tram regulations, those in an unclean dress or in a drunken state are prohibited from boarding a tram. Thanks to the Court’s decision, only clean Indians (meaning upper caste Hindu Indians) or coloured people other than Kaffirs, can now travel in the trams. (Italic portion is added)
Apartheid defended: Gandhi accepted racial segregation, not only because it was politically expedient as his Imperial masters had already drawn such a blueprint, it also conformed with his own attitude to the caste system. In his own mind he fitted Apartheid into the caste system: whites in the position of Brahmins, Indian merchants and professionals as Sudras, and all other non-whites as Untouchables.
Though Gandhi was strongly opposed to the comingling of races, the working-class Indians did not share his distaste. There were many areas where Indians, Chinese, Coloured, Africans and poor whites lived together. On February 15 1905, Gandhi wrote to Dr. Porter, the Medical Officer of Health, Johannesburg (CW. IV p.244, and “Indian Opinion” 9 April 1904):
Why, of all places in Johannesburg, the Indian location should be chosen for dumping down all kaffirs of the town, passes my comprehension.
Of course, under my suggestion, the Town Council must withdraw the Kaffirs from the Location. About this mixing of the Kaffirs with the Indians I must confess I feel most strongly. I think it is very unfair to the Indian population, and it is an undue tax on even the proverbial patience of my countrymen.
Dr. Porter replied that it was the Indians who sub-let to Africans.
Commenting on the White League’s agitation, Gandhi wrote in his Indian Opinion of September 24 1903:
We believe as much in the purity of race as we think they do, only we believe that they would best serve these interests, which are as dear to us as to them, by advocating the purity of all races, and not one alone. We believe also that the white race of South Africa should be the predominating race.
Again, on December 24 1903, Indian Opinion stated:
The petition dwells upon `the comingling of the coloured and white races’. May we inform the members of the Conference that so far as British Indians are concerned, such a thing is particularly unknown. If there is one thing which the Indian cherishes more than any other, it is the purity of type.
In his farewell speech at a meeting held in the house of Dr. Gool in Capetown, which was reported in the Indian Opinion of July 1 1914, Gandhi said:
The Indians knew perfectly well which was the dominant and governing race. They aspired to no social equality with Europeans. They felt that the path of their development was separate. They did not even aspire to the franchise, or, if the aspiration exists, it was with no idea of its having a present effect.
Gandhi joined in the orgy of Zulu slaughter when the Bambata Rebellion broke out. It is essential to discuss the background of the Bambata Rebellion, to place Gandhi’s Nazi war crime in its proper perspective.
I know it’s almost blasphemous to say it, and much as I love Smokey Robinson, I prefer this version too. The sparser, leaner arrangement and John’s husky, pleading vocal just seem to suit it better.
Mohamed ElBaradei…is not exactly a household name in Egypt – he has lived abroad for the past three decades. As the head of the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency), a position he left in November 2009, he was frequently critical of the United States and Israel…–Benny Morris, revisionist Zionist historian and apologist for Israeli war-crimes, in the Grauniad, today
Says it all, doesn’t it? ‘…frequently critical of the United States and Israel…’.
Morris trots out the phrase as though such criticisms were self-evidently unacceptable.
Of course, he neglects to mention that as the head of the International Atomic Energy Commission, it was El-Baradei’s job to be critical of countries (like Israel) who have nuclear weapons and refuse to allow inspections. Cant piled on hypocrisy piled on dishonesty: in other words, your typical Zionist neocon.
In a curious aside, I entered into a correspondence with an American named James Russell, who’s the Professor of Armenian at Harvard. He wrote to me after seeing one of my youtube videos.
It was all very odd: he was much given to gushing and was very insistent that I must come to Boston and stay with him. I soon discovered (from articles that he’d written in Ha’aretz) that he was a rabid Zionist and it became clear to me that I was being cultivated in an attempt to shore-up his liberal ‘some-of-my-best-friends-are-Arabs’ positioning.
When I asked him about his Zionism and wanted to know how he could be comfortable with the fact that he–an American whose family had been in the US for a century and in Europe for a 1000 years before that–had the right to move to the Occupied West Bank, to carry an assault rifle and to live under civil law, while a Palestinian, whose family had been there since time out of mind, was subject to military law, would be shot dead if he even so much as picked up a rock and had no right to free movement on his own land.
He answered by way of an anecdote about how he told a Palestinian neighbour in the Occupied Territories that they must learn to love the land together blahblahblah…it was a masterpiece of un-self-awareness, of mutton-headed obtuseness and of patronising happy-talk.
I realised that I simply couldn’t even be bothered to make the effort to set him straight and that I just can’t be friendly with a Zionist, anymore than I could be with a racist, an anti-semite or a fascist. He bombarded me with emails for a while but I think he eventually got the message.
The whole episode was deeply depressing. Here was an otherwise highly intelligent man, a fully-tenured Professor at Harvard, spouting the most bone-headed guff and giving the nod to a whole movement (the ‘settlers’, the most rabid, bigoted and violent of whom are, inevitably, Americans) that’s based on a racist premise and looks to a Bronze Age cult for its moral authority. Christ…I despair sometimes.
“It was all very odd: he was much given to gushing and was very insistent that I must come to Boston and stay with him. ”
Invited you to stay with him? On the basis of a YouTube video? Good Gawd; this man was clearly either A) disturbed B) not quite forthcoming about the direction of his romantic interests C) setting you up. Possibly D). The last time I had a professor (he was half German, half Persian) befriend me with suspicious ease, it turned out he was hoping I’d take his lonely American wife off his hands.
Re: Using rhetorical means to de-program a committed Zionist… I’m trying to imagine trying. Beware any friendly emails you might happen to get from the office of Alan Dershowitz as a result of this…
Re: the Groaniad: from the people who brought you Dynamite Fortune Gong nominee Julian “Leaky-dumps” Assange…
UPDATE
PS About Smokey’s version vs John’s: I also think The Beatles do Twist and Shout better than the Isley Brothers (or the song’s original performers; can’t remember the group’s name now but I think they were “white”). Some songs just come off better with a steady, square beat and a stricter, melismatics-free (or lite) adherence to the melody. Ever hear Al Green’s version of a Beatles song? Doesn’t work. “Soul” isn’t a magical attribute you can sprinkle over any arrangement to make any and every song better. But that’s just one of a million examples of positive racism we’ll have to eliminate before negative racism can be dealt with effectively. We aren’t duped by it but many, many are.
Having said all that, I still don’t expect to get away with pressing my sincere opinion that Duran Duran’s version of White Lines (featuring cameos from the originals) rocks hardest. Or that, given the choice between seeing The Beatles live in ’66, or Sly and the Family Stone in ’69, I’d opt for Sly without needing to think about it.
Do you know about the circumstances of Gandhi’s wife’s death, ET? Quite a tale.
Here’s a compact version of it I’ve found (appended to which you will find something humorous from that post’s comment thread):
In August 1942, Gandhi and his wife, Kasturba, among others, were imprisoned by the British in Aga Khan Palace near Poona. Kasturba had poor circulation, and she’d weathered several heart attacks. While detained in the palace, she developed bronchial pneumonia. One of her four sons, Devadas, wanted her to take penicillin. Gandhi refused. He was okay with her receiving traditional remedies, such as water from the Ganges, but he refused her any medicines, including this newfangled antibiotic, saying that the Almighty would have to heal her.
The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi quotes him on February 19, 1944: “If God wills it, He will pull her through.” Gandhi: A Life adds this wisdom from the Mahatma: “You cannot cure your mother now, no matter what wonder drugs you may muster. She is in God’s hands now.” Three days later, Devadas was still pushing for the penicillin, but Gandhi shot back: “Why don’t you trust God?” Kasturba dies that day.
The next night, Gandhi cried out: “But how God tested my faith!” He told one of Kasturba’s doctors that the antibiotic wouldn’t have saved her and that allowing her to have it would have meant the bankruptcy of my faith.” (Emphasis mine.)
But Gandhi’s faith wasn’t much of an obstacle a short time later when it was his ass on the line. A mere six weeks after Kasturba died, Gandhi was flattened by malaria. He stuck to an all-liquid diet as his doctors tried to convince him to take quinine. But Gandhi completely refused and died of the disease, right? No, actually, after three weeks of deterioration, he took the diabolical drug and quickly recovered. That stuff about trusting God’s will and testing faith only applied when his wife’s life hung in the balance. When he needed a drug to stave off the Grim Reaper, down the hatch it went.
mirth-inducing comments
Rowlf said…
Perhaps Gandhi accepted Quinine because it is not quite so artifiial or man made as penicillin. According to wikipedia quinine is “extracted from the bark of the South American cinchona tree” and thus could be considered to be more similar to the waters of the Ganges than to modern manufactured drugs. Of course, your article wouldn’t have been quite so sensational had it contained this information. I don’t think it unreasonable for Gandhi to mistrust a NEW man made drug derived from mold. I’m not defending Gandhi’s choice, but it is not so cold or hypocrytical as you might have us believe. Moreover, I don’t see how you’ve shown that selfishness, egocentrism, or dishonesty are demonstrated by his choice; short-sighted and closeminded perhaps but not those other things.
Christ, man…I was unaware of all of this stuff. Obviously, anyone who’s pushed as ‘saintly’ sends my bullshit detectors crazy and any Hollywood biopic must be taken with a truck-load of salt, but still…Gandhi was even more of a plaster saint than I assumed.
Fucking ‘believers’…they’ll do for us all yet…
[ed.'s note: Godsbless ye friggin Internets, M. The scales have fallen from our eyes]
To paraphrase Steely Dan: “Egypt’s cheap, but it’s not Free”… or…. YANKEES IN THE SKY BOX, THIRD-WORLDERS ON THE PLAYING FIELD, YET AGAIN
Some curmudgeonly logic: if Muhammad Hosni Sayyid Mubarak has been oppressing the Egyptian people for 30 years with the unwavering (and key) support of the US government, don’t the revolutionary protesters need to paddle over to Washington and depose the regime *there*, too, before they can expect to be “free”?
PS For the sake of aphoristic concision, I haven’t even mentioned Ain’trael in this observation…
* John Nichols Thom (1799–1838), Cornish tax rebel who claimed to be the “saviour of the world” and the reincarnation of Jesus Christ and his body temple of the Holy Ghost[citation needed] in 1834. He was killed by British soldiers at the Battle of Bossenden Wood, on May 31, 1838 in Kent, England.[1]
* Arnold Potter (1804–1872), Schismatic Latter Day Saint leader; he claimed the spirit of Jesus Christ entered into his body and he became “Potter Christ” Son of the living God, he died in an attempt to “ascend into heaven” by jumping off a cliff.[citation needed] His body was later retrieved and buried by his followers.[citation needed]
* Bahá’u'lláh (1817–1892), born Shiite, adopted Bábism later in 1844,[2] he claimed to be the prophetic fulfilment and promised one of all major religions and founded the Bahá’í Faith in 1866.[3] Followers of the Bahá’í Faith believe that the fulfillment of the prophecies of the second coming of Jesus, as well as the prophecies of the 5th Buddha Maitreya and many other religious prophecies, were begun by the Báb in 1844 and then by Bahá’u'lláh. They commonly compare the fulfillment of Christian prophecies to Jesus’ fulfillment of Jewish prophecies, where in both cases people were expecting the literal fulfillment of apocalyptic statements.[4]
* William W. Davies (1833–1906), leader of a Latter Day Saint schismatic group called the Kingdom of Heaven located in Walla Walla, Washington from 1867 to 1881. He taught his followers that he was the archangel Michael, who had previously lived lives as the biblical Adam, Abraham, and David. When his son Arthur was born on 11 February 1868, Davies declared that the infant was the reincarnated Jesus Christ. When Davies’s second son, David, was born in 1869, he was declared to be God the Father.[citation needed]
* Mirza Ghulam Ahmad of Qadian, India (1835–1908), claimed to be the awaited Mahdi as well as (Second Coming) and likeness of Jesus the promised Messiah at the end of time, being the only person in Islamic history who claimed to be both.[citation needed] He claimed to be Jesus in the metaphorical sense; in character. He founded the Ahmadiyya Movement in 1889 envisioning it to be the rejuvenation of Islam, and claimed to be commissioned by God for the reformation of mankind.[citation needed]
* Haile Selassie I (1892–1975), the Rastafari movement which emerged in Jamaica during the 1930s believes he is the Second Coming (although he himself did not encourage this belief).[citation needed] He embodied this when he became Emperor of Ethiopia in 1930, perceived as confirmation of the return of the Messiah in the prophetic Book of Revelation 5:5 in the New Testament but is also expected to return a second time to initiate the apocalyptic day of judgment. He is also called Jah Ras Tafari, and is often considered to be alive by Rastafari movement members.[5]
* George Ernest Roux (1903–1981), called the “Christ of Montfavet” or “Georges-Christ”,[6] founder of the Universal Christian Church (now named the Universal Alliance) in France, claimed to be Jesus, then God. He presented himself as a persecuted prophet to carry out the law of love unfulfilled by God’s representatives, including Jesus.[7]
* Ernest Norman (1904–1971), an American electrical engineer who co-founded the Unarius Academy of Science in 1954, was allegedly Jesus in a past life and and his earthly incarnation was as an archangel named Raphiel.[8] He claimed to be the reincarnation of other notable figures including Confucius, Mona Lisa, Benjamin Franklin, Socrates, Queen Elizabeth I, and Tsar Peter I the Great.[9]
* Krishna Venta (1911-1958), born Francis Herman Pencovic in San Francisco, founded the WKFL (Wisdom, Knowledge, Faith and Love) Fountain of the World cult in Simi Valley, California in the late 1940s. In 1948 he stated that he was Christ, the new messiah and claimed to have led a convoy of rocket ships to Earth from the extinct planet Neophrates. He died on 10 December 1958 after being suicide bombed by two disgruntled former followers who accused Venta of mishandling cult funds and having been intimate with their wives.
* Ahn Sahng-Hong (1918–1985), a South Korean who founded the World Mission Society Church of God in 1964, who consider him the Second Coming of Jesus. The church believes that his wife Zahng Gil-Jah is “God the Mother,” who they believe is referred to in the Bible as the New Jerusalem Mother (Galatians 4:26, and that Ahn Sahng-Hong is God the Father[10]
* Sun Myung Moon (1920–), believed by members of the Unification Church to be the Messiah and the Second Coming of Christ, fulfilling Jesus’ unfinished mission.[11][12]
* Jim Jones (1931–1978), founder of Peoples Temple, which started off as an offshoot of a mainstream protestant sect before becoming a personality cult as time went on. He claimed to be the reincarnation of Jesus, Akhenaten, Buddha, Vladimir Lenin, and Father Divine in the 1970s. [13] Organized a mass murder suicide at Jonestown, Guyana on 18 November 1978.[14]
* Marshall Applewhite (1931–1997), an American who posted a famous Usenet message declaring, “I, Jesus—Son of God—acknowledge on this date of September 25/26, 1995: …”[15] This was two years before he and his Heaven’s Gate cult committed mass suicide to rendezvous with a spaceship hiding behind the comet Hale-Bopp in 1997.[16]
* Yahweh ben Yahweh (1935–2007), born as Hulon Mitchell, Jr., a black nationalist and separatist who created the Nation of Yahweh in 1979 in Liberty City, Florida. His self-proclaimed name means “God, Son of God.” He could have only been deeming himself to be “son of God”, not God, but many of his followers clearly deem him to be God Incarnate.[17][18] In 1992, he was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder and sentenced to 18 years in prison.[19]
* Laszlo Toth (1940-), Hungarian-born Australian who claimed he was Jesus Christ as he vandalized Michelangelo’s Pietà with a geologist hammer in 1972.[20][21]
* Wayne Bent (1941-), also known as Michael Travesser of the Lord Our Righteousness Church. He claims; “I am the embodiment of God. I am divinity and humanity combined.”[22] He was convicted on 15 December 2008 of one count of criminal sexual contact of a minor and two counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor in 2008.[23]
* Ariffin Mohammed (1943-), also known as “Ayah Pin”, the founder of the banned Sky Kingdom in Malaysia in 1975. He claims to have direct contact with the heavens and is believed by his followers to be the incarnation of Jesus, as well as Shiva, and Buddha, and Muhammad.[24]
* Mitsuo Matayoshi (1944-), a conservative Japanese politician, who in 1997 established the World Economic Community Party based on his conviction that he is God and Christ. According to his program he will do the Last Judgment as Christ but within the current political system.[25][26]
* José Luis de Jesús Miranda (1946-), Puerto Rican founder, leader and organizer of Growing in Grace based in Miami, Florida, who claims that the resurrected Christ “integrated himself within me” in 2007.[27]
* Inri Cristo (1948-), a Brazilian astrologer who claims to be the second Jesus reincarnated in 1969,[28] Brasília is considered by Inri Cristo and his disciples as the “New Jerusalem” of the Apocalypse.
* Thomas Harrison Provenzano (1949–2000), an American convicted murderer who was possibly mentally ill. He compared his execution with Jesus Christ’s crucifixion.[30]
* David Icke (1952-), of Great Britain, writer, former footballer, journalist, BBC Sports presenter and Green Party spokesman. He described himself as “the son of God”, and a “channel for the Christ spirit”, and predicted Britain would be devastated by tidal waves and earthquakes in 29 April 1991.[31]
* Shoko Asahara (1955-), founded the controversial Japanese religious group Aum Shinrikyo in 1984. He declared himself “Christ”, Japan’s only fully enlightened master and the “Lamb of God”. His purported mission was to take upon himself the sins of the world. He outlined a doomsday prophecy, which included a Third World War, and described a final conflict culminating in a nuclear “Armageddon”, borrowing the term from the Book of Revelation 16:16.[32] Humanity would end, except for the elite few who joined Aum.[32] The group gained international notoriety in 20 March 1995, when it carried out the Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. He has been sentenced to death, and is awaiting execution.
* David Koresh (1959–1993), born Vernon Wayne Howell, was the leader of a Branch Davidian religious sect in Waco, Texas, proclaimed that he was “the Son of God, the Lamb” in 1983. In 1993 a raid by the U.S. BATF, and the subsequent siege by the FBI ended with Branch Davidian ranch burning, Koresh, 54 adults and 21 children were found dead after the fire.[33]
* Hogen Fukunaga founded Ho No Hana Sanpogyo often called the “foot reading cult,” in 1987 after an alleged spiritual event where he claimed to have realized he was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ and the Buddha.[34]
* Marina Tsvigun (1960-), or Maria Devi Christos, is the leader of the Great White Brotherhood.[35] In 1990 she met Yuri Krivonogov, the “Great White Brotherhood” founder, who recognized Marina as a new messiah and later married her, assuming in the sect the role of “John the Baptist”, subordinate to Tsvigun.
* Sergei Torop (1961-), a Russian who claims to be “reborn” as Vissarion, Jesus Christ returned, which makes him not “God” but the “word of God.” He founded the Church of the Last Testament and the spiritual community Ecopolis Tiberkul in Southern Siberia in 1990
“Yet many Christians have discovered that the Japanese view of religion can be rather baffling…”
Baffling… unlike the belief that the Super Being who created a trillion cubic light years of time and space sent an unfathomably tiny, carbon-based version of himself to an infinitesimal town on a speck of a planet in a smudge of a solar system on the rim of a nondescript galaxy about 4.3 billion years after the beginning of Time to be nailed to boards by bronze-age Romans at the behest of bronze-age Jews in a magical deal to absolve the same bronze-age Jews (and some other members of the species) of their “sins”, which are defined as grievous moral errors by the very Super Being who designed the moral equipment of the “sinners” … after not only providing the means and materials with which to “sin” but designing many of the urges (eg, the reproductive urge and its naturally corollary behaviors) as persistent and powerful compulsions the denial of which can result in insanity. Have I mentioned that the Super Being who sent Himself to be ritually murdered is also His own Son and sometimes manifests Himself as a third character called The Holy Ghost (with no specific attributes differentiating Him from His other two guises) and that He created His own mother, whose vagina he never touched on the way out of the womb? Or that, in the guise of His own Son, He supposedly ate and drank but never pissed, farted or shat for 33 years? But none of that is “baffling”.
I always wondered why those biscuits aren’t Christoform, Comrade ET… aren’t they meant to be little cannibal voodoo effigies, after all? And isn’t blood more salty than alcoholic in flavor? [ed.'s note: well, except in the case of alcoholic priests]
I’ve never entirely understood what’s going on there. Speaking as someone interested in animation and puppetry it’s interesting how objects and materials are transformed to become something else but the way that’s used to exert power in the case of the RC church is frankly repulsive.
In one of George Franju’s films there’s a scene of an RC ritual which makes you feel like you’re an uncomprehending visitor from outer space.
As I always say, ET: if you can get people to believe in the Jesus narrative, what can’t you get them to believe? Belief in Magic Bullets, Moon Landings, OBL and WMD are each a piece of cake in comparison.
Anne Atkins a journalist and religious heavy-breather of the English variety i.e appears and sounds utterly reasonable until you stop and listen, told us on Radio 4′s Thought for the Day segment for the morning news that the most plausible interpretation of the Easter story was that Jesus died and then came back to life.
The most plausible?
Surely the most plausible interpretation was that they made the whole thing up.
[ed.'s note: most plausible explanation... least plausible that they'd actually use it]
EGYPT’S CHEAP BUT IT’S NOT FREE, PART DIEU… or…. ZIZEK’S PULLING NOSE HAIRS AGAIN
[picture: Bizlam's Honeytrap Fundamentalists]
“[Zizek] is not trying to intellectually browbeat people into submission, but to radically shift any willing person’s way of thinking who comes into contact with his…” comforting McLuhanesque paradoxes and panderingly optimistic, proffered-as-daring commonplaces. (Sentence-completion courtesy of yours truly)
“I think that [Blair's] message was, if one can read between the lines, quite unambiguous… What they want is some changes that would allow the global situation to stay the same… You know how often in our multicultural era, where we’re all suspicious of universalism, we like to hear how democracy as we understand it is something specifically Western.
But, what affected me tremendously when I was not only looking at the general picture of Cairo, but listening to interviews with participants, protesters there, is how cheap, irrelevant all this multicultural talk becomes. There, where we are fighting a tyrant, we are all universalists. We are immediately solidary with each other. That’s how you build universal solidarity, not with some stupid Unesco multicutural respect. It’s the struggle for freedom. Here we have a direct proof that a) freedom is universal, and b) especially, proof against that cynical idea that somehow Muslim crowds prefer some kind of religiously fundamentalist dictatorship.”
Tell it, Slavoj! Except, of course, that A) re: “There, where we are fighting a tyrant, we are all universalists,” the “tyrant” is the guy they threw sticks and bottles at because they couldn’t throw bottles at *US* (who oppress them, backed by our gunboats, by living off everyone below us on the pyramid while deferring politely to everyone above) and B) re: “freedom”: you mean the “freedom” of an hour or a week or a month; the “freedom” of chanting en mass and holding up CIA-painted “Game Over” signs and getting it all out of their systems before the inevitable yoke goes back on?
And C) re: “proof against that cynical idea that somehow Muslim crowds prefer some kind of religiously fundamentalist dictatorship,”… one imagines that, choosing between a Christian Fundamentalist Dictatorship… ie BIZLAM (chief Diety: Dallah) and a Muslim one, they’d probably opt for the Devil they know. If they had a choice, of course.
Because isn’t one of the “benefits” of letting the Bad (vs Good) Fundamentalists take over, after a “revolution”, the provision of a default pretext for a good old fashioned Murrkan Invasion (or defenses-softening “economic sanctions” at the very least…)? Which is why they had to make Saddam “I Speet on the Koran” Hussein look like a Fundamentalist.
Not that I expect Slavoj to toy with *those* kinds of paradoxes; very bad for sales. Let’s all just sit back and watch the daily wage of the average Egyptian worker shoot through the roof now that the “tyrant” is “gone”.
During the first 30 seconds of this, Mart does something comedically terrifying, three or four times, with his mouth. Are his famous choppers acting up? Are they channeling politically incorrect mutterings from Larkin? What’s going on here?
Subject: Re: THE AGE OF NAUSEA
To: “S. Augustine”
Date: Saturday, February 26, 2011, 2:58 PM
you won’t believe this:
“A restaurant in London’s Covent Garden is serving a new range of ice cream, made with breast milk.
The dessert, called Baby Gaga, is churned with donations from London mother Victoria Hiley, and served with a rusk and an optional shot of Calpol or Bonjela.
Mrs Hiley, 35, said if adults realised how tasty breast milk was more new mothers would be encouraged to breastfeed.”
Re: The Age of Nausea
Saturday, February 26, 2011 4:04 PM
From: “S. Augustine”
To: _______
Yeah, I saw that. In all fairness, I’d actually have to see what Ms Victoria Hiley looks like before developing a gut reaction to the idea of this product. But, hey: why not sell a 2-liter carton of pudding called STRANGER’S PUSSY? Or how about an aerosol can full of SOMEBODY ELSE’S GRANDAD’S FARTS? Market’s wide open, man. I smell an opportunity. I’m thinking about sneaking some of my semen into the general population’s food chain, actually. Stay away from SOUP VILLAGE for the foreseeable future.
Steven, Just checking but you don’t work at the Manchester branch of Boots do you?
The tuna and sweetcorn sandwich I bought there a few weeks back tasted like several people had added a “secret sauce” to the ingredients. Perhaps the foulest thing I have ever eaten and I’ve eaten unintentionally black boiled chicken when I worked in Russia.
In response to your pieces above I have been trying to formulate a comment about what democracy actually is but despite the various examples currently dotted around the world I’m none the wiser.
“Fook, ET” Impressive Mancunian accent SA , the net is closing in.
Just seen Catfish sent to me by PH blog-host Mishari. Not bad and particularly interesting in the light of the upheavals on Politely Homicidal. When it began I was expecting something a bit indie/whimsical but it’s a lot creepier than that. Difficult to tell at the end whether it thinks it’s resolved itself ( adding further unintentional creepiness ) or whether it’s just gob-smacked by the neediness and delusions of those featured in the film.
many think it’s a fake documentary. If it is it has a neat trick to throw you off the scent. It uses 2 mentally disabled kids so you think the film-makers would never exploit them for fictional purposes and plays on your assumption that such kids wouldn’t want to act their roles for the film. Clever.
Re: Catfish: the explosive gusher of cultural artifacts blowing through my mind via the Net Pipe assures that I only get to ruminate on “new stuff” for a day or two before it vacates the memory banks, leaving nothing but scents and smudges. I had to Google to get it all back. I remember looking at a few trailers for Catfish (which caused a stir on sites like Hipster Runoff and HTMLGIANT right before its release) and thinking: Blair Witch 2010. The New Fake is nearly as slick as the Old Real! Now you’ve got me interested…
UPDATE:
Watching this interview with the “real” Megan, I revisit my original skepticism with this thought: maybe what’s fake (The New Fake) about Catfish is the conceit of innocence on the part of the filmmakers? Ie, I can imagine that they decided to “document” this story after Nev had already mostly rumbled (that word again) “Megan”. Otherwise, would they really have bothered, initially, to waste any time documenting Nev’s online friendship with an 8-year-old? Are hipsters like that?
But I wasn’t actually bothered whether it was real or not. As you say the premise is a bit odd but it plays nicely on the film-maker’s vanity and thus perfectly in keeping with the FaceBook generation. What’s not clear is why the painter keeps sending them paintings. Are they buying them off her? My suspicions over that would have been triggered long before the revelation that the “hot” elder daughter is completely fictional.
But as a yarn it works okay. A tougher directorial eye would have emphasised the fact that the delusions are continuing and seemingly being sanctioned by the film-makers. I can’t help feeling that Nev would be far more fucked up by the duplicity going on – he’s essentially sending dirty texts to the mother thinking her the daughter – than is made out.
FICTION: from the Savant Garde: “THE EUPHORIA SCHEDULE”
Endless revolution is the backdrop for the loves and losses of two spies, a lonely Frenchman, the victims of an office romance, intuitive economic theory, a drug-dealer/pimp channeling Abraham Lincoln’s last hour on Earth and a half-Mexican Mata Hari’s exercycle
1. The Euphoria Schedule*
The Revolution will never not be televised- Gil Scott Heron
Jacques A
Visiting North America for a speaking engagement in the 1970s, Derrida began to refer to the TV Guide, a copy of which he’d found on the leather couch in the den of his academic hosts in Ohio, as “The Euphoria Schedule”. He surprised his hosts by becoming an avid watcher of The Dating Game.
Jacques B
*The Money Game is a funny game. The Rules for which are imposed by certain Players. Nothing of Value has an objective value. Values are assigned and all the Players of the Game “agree”. When (eg) the Assigned Value for food is greater than the Assigned Value of the Money held by People X, People X must therefore starve. But why would People X agree to therefore starve? For whether an ounce of gold will purchase a ton of rice or an ounce of rice will purchase a ton of gold, compared to an absolute scale of scientific values, is arbitrary. For even when major currencies are “backed” by precious metals, they are not backed by precious metals (which have no objective value beyond their Assigned Value). They are backed by precious bullets.
I am staring into a strange bedroom with a familiar erection in the twilight.
*Let the record show that Global Recessions are impossible unless the Earth is doing Interplanetary Trade. Because the Money Game is a closed system. The Top of the System is always the top, the Bottom of the System is always the bottom, The Middle is always in flux.
I can hear a stranger showering, through the gap between the window sill and the bottom of her blinds.
*It is all subjective. The Rules of a Game are not a Science.
Io and I had our first real argument because of the revolution. Maybe I was being stupid. I get so stubborn sometimes. She was watching the screen with euphorically teary eyes. After three revolutions in not quite as many months I couldn’t find that one last little half-dram of sincerity in my emotional reserves to spare for it. Instead I made an inappropriate joke. Io asked how could I.
I remember the checkout girl and how I noticed her every time I had a reason to shop at that store until the checkout girl became the reason I shopped at that store. Half-Mexican, possibly. A little dark for a Mexican. Cocoa-brown, I mean. Her actual hair was like a lustrous blue-black wig so heavy on her head but the beauty spot near the right corner of her wide mouth was possibly painted on. I went in pretending to need tape one day and noticed she had a hacking cough and recognized a rare opportunity. I waited in her line, heart gunning, the tape in my longing hands.
The smell of the shower gel follows the sound out of her bathroom and through the bedroom and into my face.
Io stood up from the couch. She wanted to know if I’d been hiding the fact that I’m a cynical jerk all these years. I said all these years strikes me as an exaggeration when you’re talking about three and a half. Up until that moment I hadn’t been mad. I wasn’t pissed until she called me a jerk. Because no one says jerk any more. So the word jerk has regained some force. Most say you prick or motherfucker or cocksucker or cunt. I said oh yeah? I said name the city we’re watching.
“Name it.”
She coughed in her left hand several times as I stood with anticipatory euphoria in her checkout line and this encouraged me. The silver change she handed me was heart-flushingly warm and moist and the next morning I woke very happy in pain just swoon-fevering. The incoherent intensity of the symptoms that had passed from her body to mine was romantic in a way that made me think of the middle ages. It took two weeks of sweating and shitting and vomiting my soul to get back on my feet. When I returned to the store in a brand new jacket she was gone. No record that she had ever worked there or lived in this city.
“Name the fucking city.”
I had crossed a very dangerous line because of course Io couldn’t. She slammed the door on her way out of the room. So I slammed the door on my way out of the flat. I wanted to slam the door on my way out of the city. The country. The dangerous lines kept coming as in a video game. I kept crossing them with mounting senses of satisfaction and despair. Like pulling black teeth with long roots.
Tropical Rainforest comes in a cartoon-like attenuating arm of pale aroma, fingers beckoning. And very faint singing that reminds me of the very faint singing Io would do on the edge of the toilet seat while clipping her toenails.
It was so quiet on the street in front of our building.
What had happened? Why was I outside?
The hiss of her shower chokes off.
I had subliminal expectations of rioting when I exited the foyer in my huff. Brown men throwing exotic bottles at tanks etc. Bottles with necks like hung swans. But I remembered we were not in the third world. I remembered that our poverty is more advanced. It was quiet. Everyone was at home watching the revolution. Twilight saturated the untouched spaces between the arab-brown buildings on our block. I saw the floor lamp click on in our living room window. I would have been happier to see the flat remain dark as I walked away.
*A Science is based on Objective Values (eg, the Gravitational Constant, the structure of DNA, the speed of sound in a fluid, etc). A Game is based on Subjective Pleasures. The Rules of any Complex Game (eg: Economics or Religion) are complex-by-design for purposes of: A) Exclusion, B) Mystification C) Glorified Time-Killing. Simpler Games would make more sense.
Io had been gone on a business trip for five weeks. I had deliberately resisted the temptation to masturbate the final week and a half of her absence. Sexual desperation is money in the bank. Soft hot heirlooms of groin hum in a safety-deposit box guarded by wivestales. Io returned shortly after daybreak in a silver tube out of a pink sky and both of us were exhausted in a way that comes most natural to teens. I’d had a hard-on since roughly fifteen minutes before her plane touched down and the taxi home was one long kiss in a pantomime rape that was by no means unilateral. Or maybe Io would say that I’m flattering myself.
It was a turn-on that Io came back from her business trip with an androgynous haircut and a brand new color. It was like molesting one of the pale-haired boys I tutor in history. Scott or Cody Beyer. We dropped off Io’s luggage a foot inside the front door and locked it up safer than it had been for weeks and went for a hand-holding walk that felt like a second date. We went romantic grocery shopping. We looked anew at new foods Io had previously decided were too expensive.
I am lost in the hopeless fantasy that the shower-taker is the half-Mexican checkout girl and so nostalgic for the fourteen days I carried her fever like a child.
I was unpacking the grocery bags and making covert preparations for a scented bath and a relationship-changing fuck before lunch when Io made the mistake of turning on the television. Io didn’t consider it a mistake. She called me into the living room with sudden excitement.
I tried to maintain a transitory stance between the living room and the bed room but my hard-on ebbed as Io grew more euphorically teary-eyed hugging a couch cushion on the couch her boss had given us.
It’s her! Or someone similar.
2. Checkout Girl
Immediately after the two white men left, YOU THE VIEWER went behind the counter and hefted the phone out of its cubbyhole and up onto the counter beside the register. He began dialing Loop’s out-of-state number. But then he thought better of it and pulled his finger out of the worn hole in the rotary and watched it spin back home, figuring the line was tapped. Dialed up Never instead.
Yo, Mamacita!
Talked for ten minutes about three or four different things of little consequence while Never watched a re-run of Ain’t It The Truth. YOU THE VIEWER could hear the show running its course in the background while Neve Gonzalez said sure and um and really. They watched different episodes and at different times on the West coast so YOU THE VIEWER and Neve could never share the pleasure of a particular episode in real time over the phone together like he could if he’d had anyone that emotionally close in the city to share an episode over the phone with. He pictured her squirting oil in a clear coin on her pink palm with the phone shouldered against her Diana Ross jaw and rubbing the oil into her big round tits as a health regimen. Big and round and black.
New episodes were introduced during prime time on Thursday nights but every weekday you could watch your favorite re-runs of Ain’t It The Truth for most of the afternoon on Channel 8. He wasn’t sure what channel she watched it on out there. Neve would suddenly laugh along with the bigger laughs of the laugh track, the kind of laughs that ended with what sounded like standing ovations, startling YOU THE VIEWER because YOU THE VIEWER couldn’t see Moses in his heart-printed boxers with a bucket of water upended over his head or whatever the gag was. Neve would sort of bark and YOU THE VIEWER would sort of jump and then the cleansing tide of the applause would roll in.
He had an idea for an invention in which a telephone could be hooked up to the television in such a way that the volume on the television would automatically go down whenever one made or received a call. But then he remembered that everyone he knew automatically turned up the volume on the television while taking or making a call… if the cord would reach. He thought about it for awhile and realized that Never was the only one he knew who owned a remote control, the size and weight of a large Crayona box half-full of pennies. He imagined that the white men who had been questioning him had remote-control garage door openers and wood-grain cabin cruisers moored at a segregated dock up north.
YOU THE VIEWER looked out the barred window over the sink in the store room while washing his hands, counting the cars in the lot, making sure the number was no more than ten, ten cars in the lot, and then he dried his hands on his apron, like he always did, and hung the apron on the nail beside the safe, like he always did, and kicked off the crepe-soled clogs he’d gotten from Never. He slipped with a wince into his Hush Puppies, bad leg first, weight on his elbow on the edge of the safe. Like he always did.
There was an unmediated aggression of the leaves against the sun and the definition of the surfaces the sunlight struck and its pressure on his face and hands that reminded him of unprepared-for mornings after long nights of emotional trauma and zero sleep. In a word: youth. His disorientation reminded him of youth but he no longer indulged, so why was his head so out there today? The aged ripe odors of summer hit him strong and so romantic. This is the way that Lincoln must have felt on the way to the theater, he thought, but, then he thought, what a thing to think, what am I thinking? Where did that come from? Done gone crazy and back.
Had a vision of Abraham pausing to sensually grip that cool brass handle on his carriage like it was the first one he’d ever really gripped and then smoothing the plush of the long seat in the curtained ambiance in the back of the carriage with the sensual cognition of a character out of DH Lawrence. Last couple of hours on Earth.
Saw his reflection balloon across the chrome of the mount of the driver-side rearview like something going to bite him and he flinched from his own reaching hand. Maybe it’s food poisoning. Maybe he’d been getting sloppy about washing up (alcohol rub w/ cotton pads, Phisohex, blow-dry hot) after trips upstairs to handle the product. The meticulous responsibilities of maintenance in an unusual context. The last thing you need to do is jeopardize the goose and her golden eggs with half-ass sloppy.
He was all the way to the intersection of Alton and Waycock, easing behind an I-Haul displaying a kid’s half-scraped Wondermen decal over a Nixon bumpersticker when it hit him why ten was an error. It should not be ten, ten cars in the lot. Because of the Bigelows. Marilyn Bigelow in a Woolworths wig. See the Bigelows were down-state for all of September since the crack yesterday morning therefore the number of cars in the lot behind 6560 North Grant should only be nine. Which could mean the hassle of calling a tow truck in the morning. And some surly brother in his face about it. Yeah, well I’d really rather not, thanks, thought YOU THE VIEWER. Let Loop handle it when he gets back. Let the brother earn his cut.
Oh hell yeah. Delia Peacock singing Fornever After. Good station. Strong signal. Sang the chorus along and to YOU THE VIEWER’s chocolate ear it rang real beautiful. Even a tear in his eye. What is this shit, he thought, kind of laughing, embarrassed in front of himself and back-handing the tear gently. Male menopause?
An old white lady in a blue U-Boat of a Cadillac at the next light on his right snapped her face his way as though she could hear him through all the layers of glass and air conditioning until he realized he wasn’t only singing the chorus but gesturing it, too. Delia sang saviors to my left and lovers to my right and YOU THE VIEWER had pointed melodramatically right, on cue, and the white lady bodily assumed YOU THE VIEWER was pointing a piece and ducked. He could see how his big black pointing finger might look, for a second, to a white lady, like the barrel of a gun.
Madam I suggest you best never get a load of a Negro excited dick.
There was the half-built church (construction halted for lack of funds) and the dilapidated piss cinema on the corner and the 5-an-Dime in the middle of a block losing tenants left and right. The 5-an-Dime was a fluorescent set of uppers in the middle of an otherwise rotten smile. The lights were going on earlier and earlier every day. Goodbye summer. He guided the Mercury to a perfect place of rest and discovered, to his delight, that there was five minutes left on the meter. Making an undeclared fifty-grand a month and got the nerve to relish saving a fucking quarter. Whoo-hee.
Let’s see now. Housewares or gardening. Ever notice the ratio of ladies to gentlemen in the 5-an-Dime is roughly similar to night school typing class?
Heavy duty ten-gallon buckets. How did Loop come by those in bulk in the first place? Her piss must be full of some kind of acid substance which leached the plastic of vital elasticity because all the buckets got so brittle and started cracking so fast. Imagine what that shit must do to your dick. Buckets w/lids even better for a change but never seen such a thing but wait hold on what I really want is a hardware store. If anyone uses ten-gallon plastic goddamn buckets with lids it’s house painters. And here I am standing in front of the Tupperware. One aisle over from Tampax. What’s wrong with me today?
Those white men, obviously.
YOU THE VIEWER was a linguistic aficionado of state and federal stylings but these guys were definitely not in the general codex. Even scarier: one of them (the tall one, chewing nicotine chiclets) had spoken with the imperfectly-suppressed German accent. Grown men wearing black baseball caps and identical mustaches and Hai Karate aftershave interrogating him in his own office.
Out on the twilit sidewalk with a neat little red and white bag of miscellaneous bullshit such as paperclips, multicolored push-pins and a stack of Dixie Cup refills he’d felt obligated to purchase for reasons he is not entirely conversant with he looked up to see the twilight saturating the untouched spaces between the arab-brown buildings on the block.
NOW ON CHANNEL 7:
The premise of Ain’t It The Truth as follows. Moses Stone (Godfrey Cambridge) is a government agent captured and given an experimental truth serum by Moldavian spies. Moses is rescued from the Moldavians before spilling sensitive information and retires from the field but the effects of the truth serum can’t be reversed: he finds himself incapable of lying. We follow the trials and tribulations of a decommissioned government agent forced to re-integrate into the workaday world but who hasn’t the ordinary option, for example, of answering his girlfriend untruthfully when she asks if her new bikini makes her look fat. Mr. Platt, who speaks with a mildly British accent (and is played by the veteran character actor Oliver Dunn, famous for his role as the upper-class husband of a gorgeous hillbilly in the Broadway play Kissin’ Cozzens) is Moses Stone’s former control, whose task it is to make sure that Stone’s inability to lie never compromises national security. The physical comedy of Aint It The Truth involves Mr. Platt variously tipping over priceless vases, triggering fire alarms, stuffing socks, cheeseburgers or sleeping pills into Stone’s mouth and otherwise creating effective silences or diversions right in the nick of time.
Herzog enjoyed cleaning his weapon while watching the show.
He sat on the edge of the motel bed while Fordy sat propped against the headboard chewing Copenhagen with his shoes on unlaced asking Herzog to move to the left every few minutes, jerking his gun-cleaning arm. They belonged to a venerable tradition of Mutt-n-Jeff teams of Law Enforcement both covert and explicit which a company shrink had once explained to Ford, taking him aside at a social function, as a subconscious improvement on marriage, with the twist that the shorter of the two men tended to be the “husband”. This had given Ford no small secret satisfaction despite the fact that he sometimes suspected the company shrink had also taken Herzog aside and explained the same thing but with the husband-role reversed in order to flatter Herzog. Every few minutes, after asking Herzog to move to the left, Ford bent to the side and spit some Cope quite daintily into a Dixie Cup he’d fished out of the waste basket in the bathroom for that purpose and also to collect his toenails.
What you get in a motel room that you can never get at home is the invigorating woosh of the highway, the sound-effect of things are happening. Progress is alive and well, the American century careens at full tilt toward distant points on the horizon. Sit on the edge of your Comfo-Rest in the wedding-cake bedroom community which the profession affords you and you lose all sense of this movement and it is a palpable sensation of steps backward and things in vain. It’s like the Dead Sea out there or the Doldrums and even the motion-box of the Television doesn’t provide enough of the illusion of movement to keep a man from resorting to the bottle for the bottle’s built-in tilt. Ford was not an alcoholic for the very reason that his job kept him in motel rooms.
Ford had come to the conclusion that the problem of marriage was this division of the genders along the eternal theme of motion. Men prefer more of it and women prefer less of it and this is where society and physics intersect in the form of an engineering problem only slightly solved by the motion-box and family vacations. Dot and the kids and their impatience to get there versus Ford’s male dread of parking and its aftermath. Family vacations would be great if you just drove the whole time and ate for three days at nine different Howard Johnson’s and came home and they unpacked the station wagon while you sat in your seat with the motor running. Ford wondered if there were accurate statistics comparing the divorce-rates of single-family dwellings within hearing-distance of highways versus those in which the man could hear nothing.
Ford was nursing a dangerous little glow of philosophical anger within his breast. It’s like you have to criticize a thing before you can kill it. It had started that very afternoon. He hoped to fucking Jehovah it wasn’t love. How can an Anglo-Saxon agent love a half-Mexican dissident seeding revolutions like some sort of mongrel typhoid Mary? He leaned and spit some Cope into the Dixie Cup as daintily as a conservationist releasing endangered species from the tip of his tongue into a living stream and said,
“Duke.”
And Herzog moved to the left.
NOW ON CHANNEL 2:
A modest house on a hill with its back to the freeway. One retired neighbor in his drive with a gas-powered plane on a tether was doing circles, another washing storms. The storm-washer’s wife handed them down from the top of a ladder, one by one. The rest of the wide street was quiet.
How could a mere checkout girl possibly afford to live here?
Neve Gonzalez was blinds-drawn masturbating on her Kineti-Cycle in her lustrous veil of blue-black hair, hazel eyes on Godfrey Cambridge, hump-grinding the quality leather of the saddle, working her lather in the grain by the nether-light of the noon she’d locked out of the room for this purpose. The seams between the slats of the blinds were ingot-hot. She gripped the grips on the handlebars and pedaled through the sweat.
The odometer made the amazing claim that she’d done seven miles since the beginning of the episode and two of those since the commercial break alone and she saw the Liquid Prell and the descent of its pearl as though it were an animated billboard she’d glided by completely unimpressed. Just a little tired of pretending to be impressed by artificial white women. The white women she knew had spider veins and corns and farted on the way out of the elevator. Neve’s tresses were ravens’ wings in her peripheral vision and she rose at speed on a steep road out of the raven-haunted woods of her fantasy towards the bright black moon of Godfrey’s vaselined face. They literally vaselined his face to make it shine in the studio lights to provide this powerful impression. The Nielsen figures were off the charts. Never was coming and coming still in rapid vulval-cream-lubricated alternations of very high left and right knee. ¡Viva la Revolución!
California was pouring its free gold through living room windows when Gonzalez emerged from the bedroom. She could still smell the Hai Karate ghost of the men who had stood in this very spot with their cheapo note pads eliciting dictation from her. She was thinking how everything is a matter of the proper sequence. Civilization depends on it. The men with the notepads leave the premises and then you beat off. You commute to the firing range and the cardboard cutout swings into view on its hook and only then do you shoot. Think of all the calamities that befall us, she thought, though not in so many words, when we fuck our sequences up.
The guy who does sound for our shows has a fantastic vinyl LP from the 50′s of how to teach your parrot to speak. It’s 30 minutes of a BBC voiced gentleman saying ” Who’s a pretty boy” on one side and …. errrr…. and…… I can’t actually remember what the other side said. The idea being you put it on, go out and when you return the parrot can talk to you … or kill you.
Ken Campbell the late, great monologuist and theatre-maker taught his parrot to say ” I used to be an egg”.
Just finished Libra – I really must thank you for bringing Don De Lillo to my attention. A revelation. I thought the ending of Libra – the mother’s elegy for Lee was an extraordinary bit of writing. Not what you’d expect at all.
Yeah, Libra is another masterpiece. I can only hope that when Donnie D claimed to actually believe (in real life) that Ossie was the lone shooter, he was being sarcastic. Or a chickenshit. Because the book was so much smarter than a belief of that crimped nature could contain!
Re: Campbell’s parrot (in the pantheon with Schroedinger’s Cat and Maxwell’s Demon): self-aware repetition was its enlightened form of mind control
One day I was about
to have sex with a girl who just
had a baby. She had milk.
I tasted it and thought,
Hmmm this is familiar. I asked
my friend with
5 kids his thoughts. He said oh yeah,
breast milk tastes
like the milk left over in the bottom
of your Frosted
Flakes bowl of
cereal! He was absolutely
correct! Nice reverse
engineering!
OH DEAR: SILLY WOGS CLAMORING FOR THE REPATRIATION OF SOME OF OUR IMPERIAL TROPHIES AGAIN
Turkish minister to demand return of Bronze Age sphinx
Turkish Culture Minister Ertugrul Gunay will meet his German counterpart in Berlin on Tuesday and demand the return of an antique sphinx housed at the Pergamon museum, his entourage said.
“The minister will meet the German secretary of state, Bernd Neumann, and the question of the sphinx will no doubt be raised,” the source said, requesting anonymity.
Gunay, who was to attend a tourism fair in Berlin, said last month that if Germany refused to return the Bronze Age sculpture, Ankara would withdraw excavation licences from German archaeologists working in Turkey.
The sculpture of a lion’s body and a human head was discovered in the ruins of the ancient Hittite capital Hattusha in central Turkey in 1915. The German team took it to Berlin’s Pergamon to restore it, but nearly a century later it is still there.
Turkey set a June deadline for the return of the sphinx, threatening to replace Germans working on the Hattusa dig with a local team.
German archaeologists have been working at Hattusha since 1906.
The Pergamon was built in Berlin in 1910 to house the frescoes of the great altar of Pergamon — whose modern name is Bergama — in western Turkey, discovered in the late 19th century.
1. Ambition makes cowards of us all 2. Predictions are wishes 3. Can’t make a bloody omelet without some blood 4. The best way to control the opposition is to hire it 5. Distrust Your Buzz 6.
Congratulations on your purchase of DUMBOCRACY, the ultra-real Meatspace MindGame™ designed to grant you the pleasure of total control over a population of gullible, docile and infinitely oblivious creatures called Duples™! You’ll watch your Duples™ birth, feed, fight, breed and die without the slightest clue as to the actual rules of the game they’re trapped in! You’ll use your Spirituality, Emotionality, Anti-Intellectuality and Consensus Keys to keep your Duples™ divorced from any edition of Reality not explicitly crafted and activated by our patented E-Z Reality Tool Bars! And don’t forget to use the Idendidy Funkshun to keep those Duples™ divided into easily-manageable, mutually-antagonistic Tribes or else… Ooops! GAME OVER! Centuries of guaranteed fun for the whole aristocracy!
7. “Reality TV”: the flagship oxymoron of our epoch 8. “Stop Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”: Because We Need A Politically Correct Murder Machine 9.Hypernomics: Buying the world with the interest earned on owning it 10.Deviant Psychotopology: The Hollow Insider mistakes being Inside for having Inside 11.
Depression the Bear (a flash fairytale):
Down a trash hill and over an evaporating pond sat Depression the Bear’s house. There was nothing especially bad about it.
12. Success is an STD 13. Equal Opportunity Superiority 14. “we’re reaching the point where commodities outnumber ideas by such a ratio that just putting two or three commodities next to each other will now have to stand for an idea” 15. Young people like young poems, middle-aged people like middle-aged poems and old people like young poems. 16. People use the word “Bloggers” the way one might say “Cookers”. There are gifted chefs and there are face-stuffing slobs capable of burning (and then eating) a discount frozen pizza every evening. What kind of cunt addresses both ends of that spectrum in one utterance? 17. art is that which could not be mistaken for anything else 18. Argument is architecture; you can’t demolish a well-made building by defacing it with silly graffiti or knocking a few roof tiles off of it 19. Why isn’t Xmas called Tmas?
20.
Q: “…once you start setting arbitrary limits on what someone is willing to pay you for your talent regardless of what it is- where do you stop- or rather where does your neighbor stop? That’s the folly of Communism in a nutshell.”
A:
F*ck Communism. F*ck “the people”, too! I’m not a “joiner”. Neither do I buy into propaganda. I enjoy seeing things as they are.
Capitalism would work just fine if they rolled it back to sustainable levels (*nobody* needs to be a frigging *billionaire*) and scraped the Sociopath gunk out of it.
Decent wage for an honest day’s work; fair prices for services and commodities; nobody earning mind-boggling sums off of predatory practices and scammy, zero-value shell-games. Rational place to start?
The *natural and ethical* limit comes in during the give-and-take of negotiation. When neither party is under duress, a balance is struck, both parties walk away having more-or-less gotten what they wanted. One of the runaway parts of “The System” as it is (I won’t even go into Wall Street) is that far too many of the negotiations are now wildly imbalanced; one party is under duress, the other party walks away having executed an unlubricated anal probe with two pineapples… this is where it starts going wrong. The point is not to put an artificial cap on Billionaires’ income… the point is that you can’t have a billionaire in Munich unless a million people in Guam are working for two cents a day to manufacture his Whammo Kazoos for him. And the duress under which that 2 cents was “negotiated” is applied, essentially, at the end of the day, by the military. That’s not the “Invisible Hand” at work. That’s gunboat economics and that’s how we get what we get from most of the planet. Now, excuse me if I invoke the Theological concept of Evil at this juncture.
21.
Yankees who cheered and tweeted euphorically as Tunisians, Egyptians, Angolans, Iranians, Libyans, et al, walked into bullets in attempts to depose their respective nominal despots did not, on the other hand, flock in millions to Wisconsin. Couldn’t even depose a Governor. Couldn’t miss a day of work.
More importantly, it’s obvious that a habit of thought among Yankees is to conceptualize those brave foreign brownies as a poignant biomass: any group of people seen from a distance is a faceless throng, while any throng seen from very close up is full of the faces of actual individuals who are as attached to their lives as the Yankee spectators are to their own. The distance is the problem and it isn’t physical. This distance is the ingredient that both Virulent, and Friendly, Racism have in common. In the physics of Empathy, the Force of Identification, in Human Terms, is an inverse square of the Distance… which is, itself, a function of Race, Class and Language.
Yankees may not Identify closely with the French or the Swedes, but the last thing they’re prepared to see is Whites being gunned down by government troops in some square (imagine reading reports of White Women having their bodies “torn apart” by machine gun fire, as was the case, color-reversed, in reports from Angola, recently). Speaking “Foreign” Languages estranges Europeans from Yankees but it does not Mediate their Total Status as Humans on a Yankee Planet. Being an Unmediated Human comes with some privileges, still, and one of those would be the horror a massacre of Total Humans, fired-upon in a square by government troops, would inspire in Spectator Yankees. The horror would eclipse any Revolutionary Spectator Euphoria and its collateral Euphoric Spectator essays and speeches; the horror would ruin the Spectator party.
After all, all of us, deep down, know very well that the Brave Brown Faceless Humans gunned down in these so-called Revolutions (and as is still happening, even, in some cases, after the removal of their nominal despots) died in vain.
Now get back to work.
22. Philosophers write as though they are charging by the hour; Americans read as though they are paying by the minute 23. Sex is the only activity during which sexism is impossible 24. In Sci Fi and Porno, how the characters are doing what they’re doing is more important than why they’re doing it, and what they’re doing it with is the most important of all 25. Pain is Evolution’s way of keeping us from eating ourselves 26. Infinite compassion requires infinitesimal status 27.
28. The perceptive literary critique is psychoanalysis which transcends the goal of therapy (and vice versa) 29. Re: “Shock and Awe”… remember when they called it “Blitzkrieg”? 30. There are fewer things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio… 31. How can one possibly conceive a love for the greater mass of humanity without first seeing it as toddlers? 32. Men have abused women just as women have abused children just as the rich have abused the poor and the vital have abused the decrepit… it was never a matter of gender or class but of species. Or phylum. It’s not really Racism or Sexism or Ageism or Lookism or Classism or Nationalism: it’s Powerism.
Oh, Christ…I love Nina Simone but that fucking song epitomises everything I loathe about 3rd-rate musical hackery and cheap sentimentality…of course, she knows it only too well: how could an artist as sensitive to nuance as NS not? Mind you, watching her visceral disgust for this over-ripe, sub-sub-Brill Building tripe is an instructive delight.
[ed.'s note: wait, M... didn't the 2 Neils (the Sedaka-Diamond virus) punch the clock at the Brill? If so, can we revise "sub sub" to "sub"...?]
It’s one of the most creative breakdowns ever recorded and well worth whatever the ticket price was, I’m sure… she comes *this* close to killing most of the front row (starting with the ones who were ready to enjoy a straight rendition of “Feelings”); and I esp. like the very strange, bold and rageful song she begins to improv-channel near the end
It’s a kind of Newtonian equation that when things go seriously wrong on stage they last longer than they do in the “real” world.
A friend of mine witnessed a complete nervous breakdown on stage by 60′s chanteuse Kathy Kirby in the 80′s. It was a benefit gig for a youth centre – she was a friend/ ex-lover of the woman who ran the place so did it as a favour. A massive mistake for all concerned apparently.
The verdict on the death of reggae star Smiley Culture was that he stabbed himself in the heart when the police raided his house. Who commits suicide by stabbing themselves?
Death with a knife would be slitting your throat or wrists. Very quick apparently. Not sticking it in between your ribs in the hope it hits your heart.
1. You know, of course, I was being snarkastic about Kelly, Comrade ET… it’s clear the bastards had every reason to off him. And the number of people who suddenly “kill” themselves when surrounded by coppers is worth a paranoid’s wink, too. I also like the “suicide by double-gunshot” joke (and it really does appear on coroner’s reports from time to time)*
2. “A friend of mine witnessed a complete nervous breakdown on stage by 60′s chanteuse Kathy Kirby in the 80′s. It was a benefit gig for a youth centre – she was a friend/ ex-lover of the woman who ran the place so did it as a favour…”
B.Y.T. (Before YouTube), sadly!
*back to the topic of the suicided:
We will simply not let the issue drop. How on earth can somebody have two different gunshot wounds and their cause of death still be passed off as suicide?
Do the coroner and the police who made this assertion for the death of Gary Webb think we were born yesterday?
Even if you are using blanks, the sheer pressure of the explosion is enough to kill you at close range if not completely knock you out.
According to the story in The Indy, Mr. Culture asked the invading officers if he could go in the kitchen and make a cup of tea. Evidently, he decided that tea wasn’t going to cut it and decided to stab himself in the chest instead…as one does. Perhaps if he’d opted for coffee, this might never have happened.
Mr. Culture knew something extremely dangerous, M… (apparently, he said something about “Grassy Noel” or somesuch in a frantic whispered phone call before boarding the Moribund Express)…
I think my favourite ‘suicide’ was Salvadore Allende, who apparently, in a state of advanced despair brought on by Communistic-leanings and falling tractor-production figures (I’m guessing here) called out an air-strike on himself. Full marks for style…
[ed.'s note: M! You forgot! The DATE, M! The DATE!*]
The best bit of that overlong marathon blub-fest of a film Magnolia is the beginning bit.
A man commits suicide by jumping off a building. As he falls he’s hit by a bullet fired during a marital tiff in a room on floor 5 so dies before he hits the ground.
The end frog-storm is good too but there’s an awful lot between it.
Christ you feckers are morbid! Don’t you know this is a
CAT BLOG
(the pictures of cats doing cute things are implied)?
ET, that Magnolia sequence was probably inspired by this Urbane Legend:
1994′s Most Bizarre Suicide
Don Harper Mills
At the 1994 annual awards dinner given by the American Association for Forensic Sciences, AAFS President Don Harper Mills astounded his audience in San Diego with the legal complications of a bizarre death. Here is the story…
On March 23 the medical examiner viewed the body of Ronald Opus and concluded that he died from a gunshot wound of the head caused by a shotgun. Investigation to that point had revealed that the decedent had jumped from the top of a ten story building with the intent to commit suicide. (He left a note indicating his despondency.) As he passed the 9th floor on the way down, his life was interrupted by a shotgun blast through a window, killing him instantly. Neither the shooter nor the decedent was aware that a safety net had been erected at the 8th floor level to protect some window washers, and that the decedent would not have been able to complete his intent to commit suicide because of this…
Ordinarily a person who starts into motion the events with a suicide intent ultimately commits suicide even though the mechanism might be not what he intended. That he was shot on the way to certain death nine stories below probably would not change his mode of death from suicide to homicide, but the fact that his suicide intent would not have been achieved under any circumstance caused the medical examiner to feel that he had homicide on his hands…
Further investigation led to the discovery that the room on the 9th floor from whence the shotgun blast emanated was occupied by an elderly man and his wife. He was threatening her with the shotgun because of an interspousal spat and became so upset that he could not hold the shotgun straight. Therefore, when he pulled the trigger, he completely missed his wife, and the pellets went through the window, striking the decedent.
When one intends to kill subject A, but kills subject B in the attempt, one is guilty of the murder of subject B. The old man was confronted with this conclusion, but both he and his wife were adamant in stating that neither knew that the shotgun was loaded. It was the longtime habit of the old man to threaten his wife with an unloaded shotgun. He had no intent to murder her; therefore, the killing of the decedent appeared then to be accident. That is, the gun had been accidentally loaded…
But further investigation turned up a witness that their son was seen loading the shotgun approximately six weeks prior to the fatal accident. That investigation showed that the mother (the old lady) had cut off her son’s financial support, and her son, knowing the propensity of his father to use the shotgun threateningly, loaded the gun with the expectation that the father would shoot his mother. The case now becomes one of murder on the part of the son for the death of Ronald Opus…
Further investigation revealed that the son became increasingly despondent over the failure of his attempt to get his mother murdered. This led him to jump off the ten story building on March 23, only to be killed by a shotgun blast through a 9th story window.
The medical examiner closed the case as a suicide.
I say “Urbane Legend” because it started as a joke at an awards dinner:
The story is false. No such incident has ever been reported. Most importantly, however, Dr. Don Harper Mills says he did tell the story at the 1994 dinner and that he made it up about 10-years earlier.. It was intended to be something humorous and absurd but started being circulated as true.
( hangs head in shame ) SA I tried re-writing the suicide comments substituting cat names for the human ones in order to conform with the latest TET cat blog strictures.
Unfortunately they made marginally less sense than the police’s explanations for the suicides.
But in terms of making sense it was THAT close.
I see Tiddles, Madame Fou Fou and Herbie are ready to invade Libya. Authorised by Pet Rescue and the Dog Whisperer as well ( is this sort of thing you’re after?)
[ed.'s note: that's the spirit! Nice picture (just play along) too!]
When the “low-key” social realism bores the makers of this I assume there will be an “Angry Grandpa goes on a shooting spree” clip in the pipeline.
I’m ambivalent about Ken Loach – mainly because the world depicted in Riff-Raff was right outside the door of the workshop we rented for 20 years so I never felt the need to see a fictionalised version.
The makers of this were his chubby son with a cheap camera and daily forced access, ET! This is that “corner” of America that represents about 40% of the actual population and about 1% of its Media Fantasies.
The first four or five are gems of foul despair; it’s not long before video infamy obviously softens Granpa Grendel, however, and self-consciousness mediates the presentation. But the ones where he flings the burning grill around the yard or hires a charlatan (for 150 bucks) to rid himself of “The Hag” (the malevolent spirit he believes sits on his chest, while he sleeps, to suck his breath out)… are Arbus-meets-Bosch-with-sprinkles-of-Peckinpah masterpieces. I have skirted the peripheries of the orbits around self-decapitating ragers like that during my blue-collar American dreamlife and the experience was usually funny-horrific in much the same way…
I think I was under no illusion that this was a professional job but having met a few film-crews who talked the talk and walked the walk but who were some blokes with a camera it’s becoming difficult to tell. One “crew” wanted us to stage parts of a show again so they could shoot close-ups and reaction shots.
Given that everything is on YouTube the lines are becoming further blurred.
Especially with the hand-held camera, no laughter-track, day-in-the-life-of documentary being quite a fashionable style.
A real shift of thinking. With my mum dying we looked at a few home movies. They were made for personal pleasure/documentation, I suppose if we made them now rather than 50 years ago they’d be straight on YouTube rather than shown at Xmas with the doors locked so the elder children can’t escape.
I suppose our attitude was different because the film had to be sent away and there was no guarantee it would come out as we imagined it would. Digital cameras with the instant results ( in theory ) allow you to think far more formally about how you film things. Having said that there is an astonishing amount of footage of the camera pointed at the ground as the camera-person.
God I sound old. Are there some quills that need sharpening?
Not only do I sound old I’m forgetting to finish my sentences. I’m 53 [ed.'s note: one foot in the grave and the other on an ice floe! I'm a young and hip 52, ye olde feck! Clear the way, Antediluvian!] you know!
Rewind end of penultimate paragraph
Having said that there is an astonishing amount of footage of the camera pointed at the ground as the camera-person forgets to switch the camera off and moves to the next filmable scene
Re: Future Shock and how the modern camera figures in it: my concept of my own childhood (which is anchored by perhaps a dozen curling snapshots, a third of which are faded Kodachrome and the rest stark b&w) is very different from how my 5-year-old daughter’s will be, as she already has a folder of about 1 Gig worth of fotos she’s taken with her own digital camera, not to mention the 400 Gigs (not exaggerating) of films and pictures we’re archiving, having started months before her birth. She will have a pretty accurate sense of her actual childhood, whereas my childhood changes according to the era I’m thinking back on it from and is largely a mood-contingent fabrication, I’m sure.
Even more astonishing: I didn’t get a digital camera until 2003 or so! Before that, the late-90s are represented by nude Polaroids of my first (satanic) wife plus stray rolls (which were digitized as an added service) from disposable cameras. Nothing from 1991-1996; one picture from 1990; a handful from London; some professional band promo shots from ’85 and then ’87…. nothing from college… one yearbook photo from High School….
Kids with my daughter’s birth year are of the most thoroughly documented and publicized (and surveilled ) generation in history. That has to have a psycho-social impact. Time (and revolution?) will tell, Comrade ET.
Related, somehow: my daughter just lurched into the room complaining that her right wrist is hurting. I explained it’s owing to over-use of her mouse.
I initially thought this lack of camera-coverage was because my father had tired of photographing my 3 elder brothers when young but discovering much later that I was the result of an affair my mother had explained the reluctance of the photographer.
I find those kinds of photos almost unbearable to look at ( not because of embarassment but … I’m not sure exactly why, the context in which they were taken I think ) so it’s just as well there are hardly any of them.
[ed.'s note: at least you can be reasonably sure that your bio-Dad isn't Martin Amis or Ted Nugent]
Comrade ET, you will inevitably hit the bigtime as an Artiste when you reach the correct age (70 feels retrospectiveable)… and your picture-perfect Bohemian Autobiography will snap right into place!
when I need to fabricate parts of my undocumented early years I will consult you for some unexpected avenues and possibilities.
After all there’s no point inventing something prosaic.
[ed.'s note: My daughter will be a master of HoloMorph 3.0 by then, ET... she'll knock something real spiffy up for you... for a mere few million Global Credits...]
Unless she’s prepared to negotiate I may have to go to the Angry Grandpa.
Readers of my autobiography will be surprised at the sudden bursts of swearing and rage against grills that I exhibit in the Unphotographed years but the sudden ( almost violent ) change of temperament when I finally start to appear on photographs could be the book’s selling point.
“at least you can be reasonably sure that your bio-Dad isn’t Martin Amis or Ted Nugent”
Ted’s a wild man but he would have had to have reached puberty aged 7 in order to sire me. As he doesn’t appear to have matured yet aged 62 we can cross him off the list.
A bit of a relief actually as much as I like “Journey to the Centre of the Mind”.
I’m reading Things by George Perec. written in 1965 it’s basically a more dispassionate version of those anti-hipster websites that crop up.
It’s a series of lists cunningly disguised as prose – I’m half way through and it has a momentum which suggests it will develop beyond that. Though i wouldn’t be too disappointed if it continues as it started. And by lists I don’t mean those horrendous Nick Hornby lists.
Why am I telling you this? I don’t know – probably to keep my mind off the news that the UK are bombing Libya now.
The Perec sounds interesting, Comrade DJ Sensei ET… I’ll have to try to find a copy (though, to be fair, the hipsters Perec had in his sights wouldn’t have deserved it nearly as much as their spiritually-hollowed-out godchildren do).
Re: the Anglophone Hegemony bombing the fuck out of yet another oil-rich territory: it’s funny how low the threshold for triggering cries of “regime change!” in the west is… when it comes to oil-rich territories of the orient. Get 1,000 people marching in a square for a week and The People have spoken, as far as we’re concerned… unless it’s in fucking Wisconsin or in front of Buckingham Palace. Shouldn’t a country get to put it to a vote, whether they want to be bombed to pre-Stoneage-amenities-level or not? Not that the Nazis ever considered the dreams and wishes of a targeted nation before Blitzkrieging… well the Nazis were fucking rude, weren’t they? You see what I’m getting at.
Perec isn’t venomous but life is marked out by the things people own – in this case a Sunday Times colour supplement lifestyle.
So the character’s personalities have no more weight than the descriptions of the things they own or aspire to own. He could well twist the knife but it also might be stronger if he remains descriptive. His membership of OuLiPo suggests the latter.
It’s the mixing of oil with “humanitarianism” that sticks in the craw. Gaddafi is a blatantly unpleasant individual but so is Mugabe who starved his country, ran its economy into the ground whilst lavishing wealth on his inner circle, refused to give up power against the wishes of the voters and all manner of other rudenesses.
Yet no call for regime change, no setting up of no-fly zones, nothing bar the flimsiest of protest from the UK government is even considered.
I didn’t know Jeff Koons had been commissioned to commemorate the latest attempt to boost the country’s morale in austere times by subsidizing the marriage of a couple who have already got a lot of our money.
William appears to be morphing into Matthew McConnaghey – the well-known spelling mistake ( joke courtesy of Spike Milligan ).
A bit matte (and/or boob-free) for a Koons, though, no? (closer to Spitting Image) I like A) how the best-laid-publicity-plans of royals and mere men couldn’t keep the groom from losing his hair before the big day and B) how almost every photo of the fella crops the shining top discreetly, as if we don’t already know.
I am slightly shocked that royal fever seems to be taking off in the North American colonies again (shades of Di, herself a shade). Remember back in 2004 when the Guardian (or something similar) started a well-meaning mass-letter-writing campaign, from ordinary Brits to ordinary Yanks, in an effort to export sweet reason, in the friendliest tones, pleading with Yanks not to vote for GW again? And nearly every response from the Yanks had something to do with teeth?
re: Koons I was thinking more of the sentiments of those carved wooden Bavarian bears or the giant Pluto hugging a policeman ( or something, can’t quite remember, I’m 53 etc. etc. ) rather than a polychrome recreation of La Ciccolina’s anus.
The British book of Dentistry was a gag in the Simpsons to encourage Bart and Lisa to visit the dentist by horrifying them with results of those that didn’t..
There’s a Powell & Pressburger double bill on this afternoon. Terribly British ( I’ll check the dentistry and report back ) but there’s something rather extraordinary about them as well which lifts the films out of the cut-glass accented middle-classness of it all.
CROSS-TOWN Walk -or- ELEGY FOR AN AFFORDABLE STUDIO SPACE
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Long walk with Comrade DJ Sensei JR this afternoon in the chilly sun. The point is to enjoy the sun before the summer heat comes back and brings the odor of dogshit and garlic breath to a sultry boil. The natives I know (with the dainty exception of Beloved and one or two others) don’t know what I mean when I say these things; they’re largely immune to the violence of foul public odors, weirdly, while also being generally germophobic: it’s not uncommon to see Berliners quite happily attending a meal at a sidewalk cafe in whiffing-range of a sewer, oblivious to the ambiance of municipal bowel… but just watch one flinch at a handshake. I’ve seen Germans glare their way through the extreme nearness of a beggar who smelled like fresh shit on a burst corpse rather than give up a seat on the U-Bahn to change wagons. I have never once seen Turkish passengers do this; they pinch their noses and run, laughing or cursing. It’s my policy to exit a stinking train without inner-debate.
Comrade JR is losing the unspoken lease on his studio this week; a fashion label from London is taking over the entire floor of the ex-piano-factory for 120X the rent that he once paid for his nice little corner room with a view of the courtyard. We’ve seen booms and busts here but in twenty years, it seems, the dirty little secret of the absurd affordability of this city has finally leaked to the wrong ears. The cool days are definitely over now; all we can do is make the most of the quasi-amnesties of transition. The new airport (direct flights from here to terrible places like NY) will mark the terrible end. Reminds me of the dramatic E-major closing “A Day in the Life”. Or the gist of “Five Years” from the Ziggy Stardust album. But I think it’s closer to three than five, Zig. Smiling and waving and looking so fine, indeed.
Comrade JR was at a fancy dinner party with his Beloved this weekend, a party hosted by one of Germany’s great auteurs of the New Wave, and the guests were actually talking about Derrida and Adorno at the table… which struck me as unbelievable until I remembered that the guests were German. American academics would have been talking politics (gingerly), or they would have leavened some fancy theoretical talk with plebby pop references, or even centered some loose chat on interrogating GaGa’s Queerisms; Americans would have considered unadulterated talk about Adorno and Derrida at a dinner table to be pretentious and embarrassing (unless they were students, but they weren’t: they were grownups, in the range of 40-to-late-’50s). Comrade JR reports that the auteur diffused this cloud of twaddle with an expertly-placed joke and I was reassured: I like the man’s work, which makes me want to like the man, which is the charisma-driven reality of the Arts. The auteur is a very tall, good-looking, extremely intelligent fucker of c. 60.
After the dinner, JR told me, he and his Beloved mounted their bikes in the early hours and peddled, slightly tipsy, across a couple of neighborhoods, home. The other guests (architects, curators, etc) drove to their status-bunkers in their status-panzers but JR and his delicate little inamorata rode the romantically abandoned streets on wobbly bicycles against the fresh black Berlin wind. I was moved when he told me how guilty he suddenly felt that his Beloved was on a wobbly bike in the cold instead of what the pretentious bitch who had dropped Derrida on dinner was riding in at that very moment. But his Beloved was exhilarated out there on the empty streets with him, peddling hard and singing at the top of her lungs. From a distance (and not much of one) she looks about 15 to JR’s illusion-of-distance-conferred 27. I romanticize my friends (and dramatize my enemies and ironize myself ).
JR didn’t say so but I assume they fucked like Miles-loving Bohemian Gods in their huge Bohemian flat, (complete with a home cinema, with a wall-sized treated-linen screen and weird Korean teas) when they finally made it home. Adorno, Hegel, Benjamin… there’s no way you’ll convince me these poor fuckers had excellent sex lives. As animals these counterfeit immortals were tragic failures. Their respective opuses are glorified suicide notes. I think of classical German culture, in general, as a suicide note/last-will-and-testament, actually… and of American culture as a ransom note.
Where was I?
Comrade DJ JR and I parted ways after a two-hour walk but I still had an hour of walking ahead of me. Not ten minutes after waving goodbye I came across this graffito, from an American student-tourist (obviously):
THE UNIVERSE LOVES YOU! LOVE THE UNIVERSE BACK!
Which was the dumbest thing I’d read all afternoon. And so tragically, delusionally, American. For, as it happens, 99.99999999999999999999% of the Universe is so hostile to human life (and biological existence in general) that it will flash-freeze, vaporize, dissolve, suffocate, dismember, or neutron-strip you on contact. Synchronistically, I then found, in my Facebook, after making it to the airy flat my family and I use for protection against the mind-boggling caprices of the Universe, a link to the following, on the topic of the Japanese earthquake, from a Yankee expat who barely escaped death in the crisis:
“Somehow at this time I realize from direct experience that there is indeed an enormous Cosmic evolutionary step that is occurring all over the world right at this moment. And somehow as I experience the events happening now in Japan, I can feel my heart opening very wide. My brother asked me if I felt so small because of all that is happening. I don’t. Rather, I feel as part of something happening that much larger than myself. This wave of birthing (worldwide) is hard, and yet magnificent.”
I immediately forwarded the excerpt, along with the following comment, in an email to JR (I hadn’t even removed my walking boots yet):
No, you stupid cunt, it was a really big earthquake, which caused a tsunami, and this was not the Earth’s wise way of enlightening humanity; it was an insentient fucking geological process which, incidentally, crippled or killed thousands of unlucky people whose friends and relatives don’t feel cosmic as a result of the catastrophe. If there had been any intentional lesson for you in all this, a building would’ve collapsed on your insufferably simple-minded, egocentric American ass.
The nice thing being that I knew that JR would agree.
[ed.'s note: the last picture in the sequence above is the display window of a Funeral Parlor. That's Berlin, folks.]
[exchange the active verb in the photo for "read"; as ever, most images on this site are stolen from HERE]
This started as a response to an interview with Tantra Besko at HTMLGIANT; the link was posted on Facebook by Comrade DJ Sensei Edmond Caldwell, I read it and commented. Comrade Edmond commented (back on Facebook) and I tied my final Facebook response to a train of thought I had after waking this morning:
*
Steven Augustine
****As a writer who has been “experimenting” for 25 years (and reading the “experimental” for 40), I’d like to add that the fundamental problem of “avant garde” or “experimental” as descriptive terms is that, unlike, say, “Cubism” as a description, they are purely relative. That is: contingent on factors which aren’t intrinsic (to the artifacts) for definition. Which undercuts the ability to discuss the “avant garde” or the “experimental” on a technical level (or as a matter of technique).
Which opens the door to identifying the terms (explicitly or not) as matters of Lifestyle (ie, “if you like this, you’ll probably hate…”) more than specific technical developments in Literature as an artistic practice. Witness the fact that any discussion of technical “development” as a literary-historical trend is usually torpedoed when someone mentions the relatively-ancient “Tristram Shandy”… the notion that it’s “all been done before” when, in fact, Shandy can be read as a “conservative” text to the extent that anything fabulous or “experimental” about it can be put down to the whims of a narrator (traditional device) telling a story (traditional practice).
If the literary “avant garde” can finally be defined specifically enough to take on shape, we could, for example, highlight the point at which Henry James develops the aesthetic of the sentence-as-performance as an end-to-itself (whether or not James was the “first”) or trace the symbiosis of film-and-lit as they made sudden leaps in the art of narrative compression, around the turn of the previous century. But the defining, as an act or right, needs to be taken out of the hands of the audience (which is the consumerist tendency) and put in the hands of the practitioners. Which would be another step towards shifting the practitioners away from an Accommodationist stance (again: the consumer-friendly default) towards being wonderfully *challenging* again.
So much of what’s considered “avant garde” or “experimental” at the moment strikes me as mere whimsy or whimsical satire or decoratively-weird-as-an-expression-of-lifestyle… too easy to down in one gulp or create in one blurt…not a plausible next-step in the technical development of literature as an artistic practice. Caveat: I don’t mean “development” in the value-judgment sense of “progress” (storms can be said to “develop”, despite the absence of intended goals). But it feels to me that the sense of the “experimental” in Lit is now trapped in a fatal eddy in the current, in which the déjà vus, now, are of previous déjà vus.
18 hours ago ·
*
Edmond Caldwell
I believe I mostly concur with this concise précis of the situation of contemporary avant lit, comrade A. Although – ’tis a pity – I also believe it will be lost on a significant portion of the commentariat there. An anodyne pluralism prevails in culture, in which being “innovative” is reduced to a lifestyle choice; the corollary is a lack of rigor, of real intelligence — I mean mostly aesthetic intelligence, but also some measure of critical intelligence. There’s too much scenester-ism, and way too much time spent slackly reading and congratulating one’s immediate contemporaries, and almost none of the oppositional spirit that was such a vital component of the historical avant-gardes (Dadaists, Surrealists, whatever). Today “experimental” writing participates in own ghettoization, quietly tending the whimsical growths and grafts of its avant-garden. I should add that this is a historical impasse and not just the function of various individuals’ moral failings, although we are also ultimately responsible for where that history goes from here.
5 hours ago ·
*
Steven Augustine
Indeed, EC! I’ve been bashing my head against this one, in public, now, for nearly a decade. The crashing irony being that nowadays, even “writers” aren’t in the mood to read very much material. During my comment-spree on HTMLGIANT last year, I got a lot of emails from people who had come to my site (intrigued by my swashbuckling)… but they complained that they *couldn’t figure out how to read the site*. In light of which, I wonder how “experimental” (ie difficult) texts have much of a chance. Or nuanced, layered writing in general.
(I like “Avant Garden”!)
26 minutes ago ·
*
Steven Augustine
I was thinking that there’s an explicit political dimension to this, as well. The deal in the sphere of “Western” Hegemony seems to be that the electorate-audience will remain “innocent” (aka ignorant, unread, “positively” deluded) in exchange for not being openly disappeared, fired upon by troops, randomly snatched and tortured. The really clued-in populations are the ones which suffer the most blatant abuses, it seems. There’s even a subliminal warning in The Christian Manifesto that Adam and Eve didn’t open themselves to Pain and Death until availing themselves of the knowledge snack. So, in a way, going post-literate and living in a delusional state of incessant “entertainment” may, in fact, be a strategy for avoiding pretty explicitly-threatened consequences.
16 minutes ago ·
This last notion deserves expansion.
[the junior writer, sans glasses, and his wife]
Over at Dan’s (where I’m so non-grata that he refuses to respond to my comments anymore, apparently; oh hissy hissy fit!), I responded to a post about the innocuous Nicole Krauss’ jejune soporifique re: bookstores:
Nichole Krauss is very worried about the disappearance of bookstores, which are apparently run by men and women of great nobility:
“The bookseller. . .was, from the beginning, an innately independent figure, in spirit if not by law. As the availability and variety of printed books increased, the bookseller became a curator: one who selects, edits, and presents a collection that reflects his tastes. To walk into a modern-day bookstore is a little bit like studying a single photograph out of the infinite number of photographs that cold be taken of the world: It offers the reader a frame. Within that frame, she can decide what she likes and doesn’t like, what is for her and not for her”.
Etc.
my comment:
Krauss and her husband are spokesmodels for a demographic notable for the padding which protects it from reality. But the warning here is that Literature is fast becoming another branch of the Nostalgia Industry catering to grads with disposable income and certain stultifying tastes (like Krauss): the picture she paints reminds me of the kind of sepia-tone imagery they used to sell Yuppies their expensive granola with.
One of the tacit duties of the Nostalgia Industry is, of course, to bash the Web… but it’s peculiar that Krauss hasn’t, apparently, encountered the “know-nothing know-everythingness” infesting the wares of even the finest whole-bran bookstores of yore. But that’s the ultimate deformation the Nostalgia Industry is wreaking on Lit: writers are suddenly presented as gently-wise, infinitely-circumspect, impeccably-PC spokesmodels instead of the lying, bragging, bigoted, angry, violent, addiction-prone fuckups the book-mad once looked to for the imagination’s rude sustenance. If that’s what Krauss’ idea of gate-keeping has done for us, I’ll take my chances with the unfiltered herecomeseveryone-ness of the Web.
Posted by: Steven Augustine | 03/22/2011 at 08:28 AM
People who make a point of bashing the Web for all the bullshit it carries… as though the bullshit is the Web’s defining characteristic… are under-read and/or naive cunts who obviously believe that Fox, CNN, the NYT and the propaganda-lurid “history” books they “studied” in school are lucid, objective, fact-encrusted visions of Truth&Reason. Again, the warning against knowledge in The Christian Manifesto’s paradise parable is obviously quite effective.
It’s niggling the shit out of me, btw, that I meant to write herecomeseverybody-ness, in that comment, but posted herecomeseveryone-ness instead. A genuinely writerly niggle.
”We are flecks of sentient nano-duration on the tip of a corollary curve of unfathomable (and unfathomably unintentional) processes… but that doesn’t mean we can’t be nice to each other or be happy. Embrace your Insignificance; discover Compassion; co-create Love.”
—Pastor Prime (husband of Ann Ominous), March 2011
My home laptop gets emails but can’t send them at the moment I’m not in the workshop til Monday so a kwik reply to your position in the Coalition of the Unwilling.
It’s one thing to tilt at the publishing industry and its many skewed practises but nailing your colours to the Jacqueline Howett mast seems a particularly barmy way to go about it. Rather like designing a cannon that fires backwards.
Erm… not that anyone should misinterpret the ambiguity of your comment in such a way as to think I think that illiterate fucking Howett dilettante (dilliteratante?) is anything but, Comrade ET…! (larf)
Not one of my better phrased comments it must be admitted though I did like the cannon firing backwards bit. Perhaps it distracted me. Perhaps I’ve got Howettheria and my grammar has become corrupted. You snake etc. etc.
Oh, it was perfectly-phrased, ET… just a little like one of those situations in which the viewers at home can’t hear the other side of the phone call; or, no: better: once I was strolling along a crowded sidewalk with an acquaintance who was caught up in relating the basest perfidy of a lady what done him wrong… dramatizing the tale in an unfortunately-formulated second-person narration, eg: “I BUY YOU NICE CLOTHES AND EXPENSIVE JEWELRY AND YOU PAY ME BACK BY SUCKING SOMEONE ELSE’S DAMN… etc. etc.
I just vomited last week’s latte, some echinacea from 2002 and a fifty-pound hairball from thirty-five years of my feminist sex technique. Now, I was a soft-spoken legacy-metrosexual before I watched this abomination (posted on Facebook by a woman I immediately deleted as a result)… but now I have this terrible urge to chew tobacco, fart on a Yogini and punch a very old cat…
My resultant comment is “in moderation” (that’s Latin for “you’re not going to rain on our parade, bucko!”) but, owing to the wonders of having one’s own fucking blog, is reproduced, miraculously, here:
Cope’s precious fretting about the guarding of the “copyright” of her pomes reminds me of sitting in various cafes-cum-galleries, smirking at the mediocre paintings; how the mediocrity might almost have been touching if not for the militantly-implausible price tags on display. And Duffy’s pome is not much more than a slim vertical of homely prose, either. Why not “copyright” a boiled egg while you’re at it? Did she really rhyme “cultures” with “vultures”… ?
“While Stephen Spender thought all day of predecessors great,
Those who think all day of Steve are barely literate…”
It’s not the free ice cream I’m complaining about (though, as I’ve put it elsewhere, if the free ice cream tastes like vomit…); it’s all the fuckers out there driving counterfeit ice cream trucks.
A sample of Duffy’s squitter (the blodger who reproduces Duffy’s squitter on her page introduces it with “Anyway here it is – properly angry, immensely clever, entirely brilliant. What a woman, and what a poet”…) :
It’s no go the LitFest, it’s no go up in Lancaster,
though they’ve built an auditorium (still quite wet, the plaster)
a bar, a bookshop, office space … well, they won’t need wheelchair
access.
All we want is a million quid and here’s to the Olympics.
and
Three little presses went to market, Flambard, Arc and Salt;
had their throats cut ear to ear and now it’s hard to talk.
They remember Thatcher’s Britain. Clegg-Cameron’s is worse.
Deathbyathousandcuts.co.uk, the least of which is verse.
and
Stephen Spender thought continually of those who were truly great;
set up the Poetry Book Society with TS Eliot, genius mate.
But it’s no go two thousand strong in the Queen Elizabeth Hall.
Phone a cab for the Nobel laureates as they take their curtain call.
All in protest of British Arts Council Cuts. Which is a little like protesting a headmaster’s sacking with a photo showing his dick out. No?
PS Wendy Cope is extremely anxious that material such as the following is being freely distributed on The Internet, with no profit to Wendy Cope:
The Orange
At lunchtime I bought a huge orange —
The size of it made us all laugh.
I peeled and shared it with Robert and Dave —
They got quarters and I had a half.
And that orange, it made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do
Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park.
This is peace and contentment. It’s new.
The rest of the day was quite easy.
I did all the jobs on my list
And enjoyed them and had some time over.
I love you. I’m glad I exist.
THE BEST WAY TO DESTROY THE OPPOSITION IS TO HIRE IT
1.
The extent to which “educated” Americans are parroting anti-Qaddafi propaganda is an infernally-glowing product-testimonial to how powerful our Yankee brainwashing is: exactly which magnitude of bloodthirsty global tyrant rains bombs on so many sovereign nations for so long, and what kind of “electorate” can’t work out the greater evils, here? Qaddafi evil/ Drones Good?
Military operations of this size and magnitude are never improvised. The war on Libya as well as the armed insurrection were planned months prior to the Arab protest movement. In the words of Rep. Denis Kucinich:
“While war games are not uncommon, the similarities between ‘Southern Mistral’ and ‘Operation Odyssey Dawn’ highlight just how many unanswered questions remain regarding our own military planning for Libya.
The ‘Southern Mistral’ war games called for Great Britain-French air strikes against an unnamed dictator of a fictional country, “Southland.” The pretend attack was authorized by a pretend United Nations Security Council Resolution. The ‘Southern Mistral’ war games were set for March 21-25, 2011.
On March 19, 2011, the United States joined France and Great Britain in an air attack against Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya pursuant to UN Security Council Resolution 1973.
Scheduling a joint military exercise that ends up resembling real military action could be seen as remarkable planning by the French and British, but it also highlights questions regarding the United States’ role in planning for the war. We don’t know how long the attack on Libya has been in preparation, but Congress must find out. We don’t know who the rebels really represent and how they became armed, but Congress must find out. (Denis Kucinich, Kucinich: President Had Time to Consult with International Community, Not Congress? | Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich, Press Release, March 29, 2011)
The Process goes: Step 1: Hegemony wants to do something Nasty Step 2: Hegemony constructs The Narrative to convince the Electorate that the thing Hegemony wants to do is Righteous Step 3: The Fancy Explainers (pundits on both sides of the Pseudo-Dichotomy) confirm/amplify/disseminate the Narrative Step 4: Desired Result
Whereas the Left-Leaning Intelligentsia was once a Sincere If Flimsy Obstruction to such monkeyshines, it is now “with the program”. Lefties who scratch their heads and affect to wonder how it is that The Conversation now only ranges from Center Right to Far Right (despite the rubber bone of rhetorical flourishes like “Socialism” and “Anarchy” that some are allowed to chew on) are flattering themselves.
Read Zizek (aka Hegemony Cricket) cursorily address the topic of Libya (he was obviously happier reviewing “Avatar” and “The Dark Knight”) and what do you notice…?
SZ…Libya gave the western powers the ability to go back to this idea of the nineties of humanitarian interventions, which had declined due to the catastrophes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, what Sarkozy, Cameron and a little less maybe Obama, tell us is that we’re there to save civilians. That kind of cosmopolitan rhetoric can now reorganize or re structure the ideological field around the image of the west as a humanitarian power.
GLR. But the popular movement is facing its limits when bombs are falling and people die. How should we address this problem?
SZ. In Libya the situation is objectively mixed. I don’t think we have a clear-cut case. I have no sympathy for Qaddafi, but nonetheless I don’t think that what is happening in Libya is the same as in Egypt or elsewhere. We cannot say it’s simply and only about a bad tyrant opposed by the people. There are all sorts of tensions there like tribal relations and this is why the west loves it. The west liked that same phenomenon in the ex Yugoslavia as well. It was not politics, but tribes fighting each other. The only thing we can do, is simply ignore, side step Libya. For me what is going on now in Egypt is much more important. As I always emphasize, they are beautiful – we all cry. But these enthusiastic moments are in a way cheap.. What will happen now? How will this spirit of the revolution be institutionalized?
The striking thing about these comments is Zizek’s ability to make it sound as though humans are not really being blown to bits at all. The interviewer introduces a little unvarnished language (“people die”) and Zizek rises to the challenge like the pro he is. In Zizek’s rhetorical treatment of the concepts of them, Sarkozy, Cameron and Obama get to keep their beautiful suits on.
“How will this spirit of the revolution be institutionalized?”
Exactly how you were, Ziz.
2.
And if I read one more Normative Liberal, On-the-Payroll, thoroughly Brainwashed “intellectual” use the debate-foreclosing buzzword “conspiracy theorist”, I’m gonna puke. The neocon pundit responsible for injecting *that* viral IQ-reducer into the mix deserves a bonus. The “Leftist” American Intelligentsia is the Vichy of our era and its “leaders” appear to be clamoring for the coveted Marshal Petain grant.
3.
I just read someone in a comment thread here on FB refer to Cynthia McKinney as a “whackjob conspiracy theorist” (if this isn’t reactionary rhetoric, what is?); is the following the language of a “whackjob?”:
Shame on Press Already Calling President Obama’s Plan an “Exit Strategy”
2009/12/01***
Many in the special interest press are cynically reporting the President’s speech tonight as an “Afghanistan exit plan.” We have now reached the point where those who make and interpret current events think they can make us believe that war is for peace, ignorance is strength, slavery is freedom, and lies are the truth. Well, we know the truth, and we will not rest until every drone is stopped and no more bombs are dropped. We will not rest until peace is won. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said there comes a time when we do what we must because our ultimate measure is not where we stand in moments of comfort and convenience, but where we stand at times of challenge and controversy. At this time of challenge, we are clear: we will not give up and we will not stop.
Now, what do YOU think is more dangerous to Yankee Hegemony… making statements like the above-cited, or, uh, advocating “Socialism”? I don’t agree with everything Cynthia McKinney has to say, but what kind of Collaborator would refer to her as a “whackjob”?
Listen, I understand that academics are paid to NOT rock the boat… but you aren’t paid to go out of your way to slander genuine dissidents (not yet, at least), either… so why not try to curb the impulse? Despite the conditioning.
That Wendy Cope poem is atrocious. There’s another terrible one in the G today. I’ve read and reread them, imagining that there’s a key to them which I’m missing, but if there is I can’t find it. Strange, because she’s an excellent parodist and pasticheur. Perhaps you’re supposed to giggle at how pathetically poor they are. I can’t think of another explanation.
while i say there is no narrative thread, I believe I do make clear that there are plenty of intertextually related narrative threads. the book is heterogeneous in its approach, there is no ‘grand narrative’ that runs through it. you lay praise to Franzen in your initial comment for “tr[ying] to convey [the act of] behaving like actual people with actual problems in a tangible setting”– well, that strikes me as a lust for what can traditionally be claimed “realism,” right? even since robbe-grillet wrote his for a new novel in the 60s, people have been aware that there is little in common between ‘reality’ and ‘realism’ as it exists as a literary institution. lyotard also pointed out long ago that there is no longer any grand-narrative that seems to be controlling the arc of humanity itself, which seems to be a major point of the entire post-modernist project following modernity’s awakening in regards to the fractured nature of reality. I do specifically say “If realism actually meant realism it would be limited to talking about things happening or not happening because in life that is all that happens.”
The video-irritant with the Elton John eye-wear is there to remind us that it’s so much easier to write about writing than it is to write, MM (not that we’re the ones who need reminding)!
Not much time for long posts these days; managing (and composing for) my wife’s band is deeply rewarding but far more labor-intensive than I would have guessed when we decided to start the project. Co-raising Offsprung is still Priority One, Beloved’s Band is now Priority Two… Writing (aside from commenting abroad, which isn’t nearly as time-consuming as presenting a decent post at TET) is now my neglected deranged secret mistress, locked in the Victorian Attic, smelling of pee and gratuitous talcum powder.
Having said all that, a few thoughts:
1. Facebook. The number of friends in my account has been a running joke with Comrade DJ Sensei Barry for a couple of years now. I only started the damn thing in the first place to re-”connect” with various people I haven’t seen or heard in 20+ years; it started when I Googled the name of the girl I lived in London with in 1990 (in that baronial flat over-looking the Baron’s Court tube station. Ah, cold samosas for lunch… Ben Elton on the telly at suppertime… that satanic night I was in bed with my Maltese mistress in one room while she was in bed with her lingerie-model-mistress in the room next door…)
I pseudonymized my name in order to open a fooking Facebook account without being friended by people I didn’t want to be friended by. I added some old college buddies and even a guy I went to High School with who, it turned out (rather bizarrely, in my opinion), had been living in Berlin, not an hour’s walk from me, for ten years.
What I soon learned is that A) anyone can be a Bohemian Artiste with a quirky, attractive, anti-Hegemonic view of the World when they’re 20… but rare are those who don’t pupate and eclode into the gray moths of Typical Fucking Citizens by the time they’re 35, and B) I fucked a lot of really pretty girls who weren’t all that brilliant or Left-leaning when I was 20, plus C) nostalgia makes terrible bedfellows.
It wasn’t long before I began dreading every day’s opening of the goddamn Facebook: always some corny or crypto-rightwing or simperingly normative-liberal horror just waiting to be eyeballed. This was especially true before I was finally rid of a patriotic, smirky, aspirationally-Winston-Churchill-quoting Nashville redneck I first met in a recording studio back in 1986. His posts were bad enough but the posts of his friends inspired me, more than once, to violate Facebook decorum and rhetorically re-route their nigger-hating lower-intestinal-tracts. I somehow felt too guilty to de-friend Joe (his real and unimprovably-evocative name) because friending him (what was I thinking?) had been my idea. It had something to do with 1986 and the time we drove to that mall in his red convertible the day he’d scored a major record deal, I suppose. But Facebook is violating a natural law by re-”connecting” people who have already been wisely sorted and segregated by the Centrifugal Separators of Time and Hardwired Affinity. I was able to goad Joe into de-friending me, after much effort, by ragging quite deliberately and with deft aplomb, one morning, on Palinoid Teabuggers. Joe’s parting shot had to do with the evils of generalizing, a comment his nigger-hating friends probably “liked”.
The immense relief of having Joe gone taught me to de-friend with the untroubled conscience of a Sun King. A pretty quasi-Bohemian girl I knew just slightly before 9/11 posted some hideous video in which Uriah-Heapish men apologize to All Womyn for All (Cave)Men… she posted the video with the comment, “This made me cry”… so: click. Goodbye forever, you nitwitty cunt.
Great beauties from the near-to-distant past who’d looked me up, friended me and proceeded to have nothing to say after discovering that I’m happily-married: click, click and click.
That stupid fucking anchorwoman (now running for office) who made a nausea-inducing show of “compassion”, for the victims of the Haiti quake, in a series of kudos-craving posts (duplicating her on-camera schtick): click.
Last year I circulated a link to a short film I thought clever/insightful/radical. A few months ago, I posted the short film on my Facebook with an admiring comment… and the film’s director friended me. I was pleased. Until I started reading his fucking schmoozy-ambitious posts (recent film school grad) and had a look at the atrocious list of c. 20-30 atrociously mainstream films he “liked” every day. Christ, I really must have projected (npi) most of his short film’s higher-consciousness-imputing attributes. Click, obviously.
Yesterday I posted the following Facebook comment (subject-matter obvious) in a (real) friend’s thread:
Steven Augustine
Who cares about this Birther Crap? It’s not just a distraction, it’s a tactic… not of the Ultra Right, but of the WH itself. Program: act coy about the birth certificate until the Birthers smell blood (ie: “Good Gawd! He really *was* born in Outer Mongolia!”); stretch that out a good long time until all other issues fall by the wayside and all the Anti-Obama Eggs are in one basket. Then snatch the rug out from under ‘em by producing the disputed certificate! Slick.
But, see, this isn’t a “win” for “liberals” because the OFFICE of the Presidency has been *structurally* right-wing since at *least* the Reagan Admin. When will it finally sink in? We’re busy blitz-krieging half the Middle East (and working on covert programs to re-neo-con Central America), funneling ALL wealth into 1,000 pockets and Obamafans are doing a victory lap around Donald Trump…? Trump is silly…. but no sillier than the rest of us who seem to be ideologically unable to see the ugly reality behind Obama’s creepy-suave speeches. But what do you expect when a “democracy” runs on The People voting for the superficial qualities of the figures they “like” the best?
Whoever gets in after Obama will continue the unbroken trajectory initialized by Reagan, clarified by Bush1, accelerated under Clinton, ramped up under Bush2 and amplified under Obama… while the “electorate” is playing the ridiculous Republicrat vs Demoblican game.
Deeply frustrating.
Quite a few people “liked” this comment (including the writer Luc Sante). One of the people who liked it then tried to friend me. I was torn: I didn’t want to offend the friend of an actual friend so, reluctantly, I confirmed her request.
This morning I open the Facebook to see this woman “liking” “Michelle Obama”. What? Had she even taken the trouble to read the ranty comment I’d posted before she’d “liked” it and felt a need to friend me as a result?
Fucking click.
2. “Nothing threatens peace, justice or Life, itself, on Earth as egregiously as the gullibility of the American public.”
Who said that?
3. I always assumed that writing the least-commercial-high-quality-lit on Earth was adequate protection against being plagiarized. Yesterday, while Googling a character of mine (“Napoleon Fanon”, star of six or seven stories; Googling him for reasons too Byzantine to go into here), I discovered that this isn’t the case! My first reaction was to chuckle. But the bit that irritates and confounds me is that the woman posted all 35 pages of the story in italics. The blog (defunct for nearly a year) is kinda fluffy. I mean: my material ain’t exactly of the fluffy variety, kids. Did she read the whole story before kidnapping it? Does anyone not fucking scan and skim anymore…? Where have all the close-readers gone?
‘taught me to de-friend with the untroubled conscience of a Sun King’
Pure gold.
I’ve never had a Fbook account, not just because I haven’t got any friends, but because encounters with the past are usually disappointing. Five minutes of lively chat, then two hours of uncomfortable silence.
I was going to recommend your blog on that Guardian tips thread, but I thought you might eviscerate me.
a) I’ve already de-friended or offended (there’s a limerick in there) over half of the original mice in my misbegotten social experiment, MM… you’re much wiser than I was when I signed up. Not to mention all the naughty anti-American rants I’ve posted, thereon, which I might as well have Fed-Exed directly to the [fill in the blank with official acronym of your choice] with a beard and a turban tossed in for luck.
I also recall a friend who was an avid philanderer: three girlfriends and one FB account in his own name! Classic “wanting to be caught” syndrome.
b) Not only would I be disinclined to eviscerate you but I’m sure your hide is too tough, your feet too nimble, for the thrift-shop tool I keep for that… but such a stunt (recommending anything me-related on a GU tip thread!) would have either been asking for instant pariah-hood (pariahship? pariahtosis?) … or only as dire as their memories are long, probably. Ie: ATF would’ve flamed you.
I’m not Gay, Comrades (because we men are rather repulsive, aren’t we?), but I would give the writer of this beautiful piece an oven-mitt handjob for services rendered to Humanity (he even got the damned thing in the normally-recalcitrantly-Normative Liberal CounterPunch, which tends to pooh-pooh anything too edgy)…
Hey, if you can’t show me something, maybe you don’t have it, especially since you are a chronic liar and in the cloak and dagger business. For most English-language trials since the disappearance of William Harrison in 1660, there has been the principle of no corpse, no murder, but here you actually have an open admission of murder, widely broadcast, but no corpse, which is tantamount to destruction of evidence, whatever it was.
So the CIA is basically saying to us, The dog ate my cadaver. Frankly, this farce was so crudely put together, the explanation so ridiculous, that our overlords must think most of us are morons, brainwashed as we are by cradle-to-grave propaganda delivered via print or pixels. I hate to think they might be right.
The dirty little secret of the Pop-Porn-Fashion-Fantasy-Role-Playing Industry is that the best sex you will ever have is with your wife (I write this from the perspective of being a husband: translate gender and/or legal arrangement according to your POV).
Whereas the all-but-explicit goal of Advertizing (Capitalism’s Nanny/Lover/Ninja/Chef) is to make you want what you don’t have precisely because you don’t have it (the not-having is the spur and the hook… the endlessly-renewable mercantile resource of grievous consumer need), the Happy Human is the human who is quite fucking pleased with what she/he already has (after a general period of fundamental acquisition) and who works to deepen the connection with it all. Of course, there’s trove-tweaking: you don’t stick to an arbitrary rule of “500 books in my library”… but neither do you look at your library, one day, with tragic ennui, and decide to replace the whole damned thing with something “fresher”. Which is the kind of Sanity that the Neomania they’ve patiently built into the network of our Exploitable Neuroses is doing its best to disable. Eg: The Kindle.
When someone you’ve known (and shared wet towels and chipped coffee cups with), for years, puts his face between your legs and slurps and grunts like he’s competing in the most delicious pie-eating contest in Heaven, the explosive orgasm you will experience, as a result, is only partially down to the rhythmical application of spit-and-friction. It’s more about the fact that someone in a position to know what he’s “talking about” has paid you the kind of compliment that predates civilization and transcends the anonymous reproduction-imperative that spins our planetary(grease-flinging)meat-wheel. No handsome stranger on a bus is capable of paying you the same deeply-informed, ultimately-personalized compliment. No anonymous Penelope Cruz-lookalike (or porn star), likewise, will kiss your toy python with anything as meaningful as the lips that have smiled at you over breakfast for five years. So what’s with all the scentless, naked Javier Bardem / Dolly Parton / Adam Lambert / Jodie Foster fantasies? Simple: Capitalism.
Capitalism sneaked them in there, employing its mercurial ninja-nanny, Advertizing. Capitalism doesn’t want you to be happy with what you already have. Capitalism wants your eye to wander; Capitalism wants you to be bored with everything you buy the instant you “un-box” it. There’s an insidious connection between “needing” the next i-phone and yearning for sex with a celebrity stranger. The next i-phone and the celebrity stranger are both fucking useless and for exactly the same reason: they are only there to undermine your healthy contentment. And, in a psycho-social feedback-loop worthy of M.C. Escher, the subliminal motivation for acquiring the next i-phone is to attract the celebrity stranger (who is, after all, celebrated for her/his strangeness).
As Spock himself once put it (to Stonn):
After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing, after all, as wanting. It is not logical; but it is often true.
A pithier critique of Capitalism will never be uttered.
It is not logical. Neither is it natural. You’ve been injected with it, irradiated with it, force-fed it since (the) birth (of the age of Advertizing). But, no: Possession is 9/10 of the Joy. Longing only works as a transition. Be Here Now for Better Orgasms. When I whack off, I can’t help picturing my Wife (in those boots of hers)… which makes me a micro-Threat to the System.
None of this has anything to do with hellish marriages and/or broken i-phones, obviously. If the i-phone is totally busted, do replace it. If you wake up on a depressed sofa, one morning, to the epiphany that you’ve fucked up and married the fast-acting antidote to happiness: do change. But if you find yourself lusting after the next model despite the fact that the one in your possession is perfectly useful (and so familiar to you that you’re actually finally getting the most out of its functionality): you, my dear, are a Suckah.
The Revolution begins between your long-term partner’s legs and it radiates from there.
*[All references to "Capitalism" in this essay are understood to mean "Late-Model Capitalism", as I'm not old enough to recall earlier versions]
The espresso machine now gathering dust in the most inaccessible corner of my kitchen is a monument to your words. I think I’ve almost purged myself of the urge to acquire, then I find a shiny new something in my hand. It’s a disease. My mother claimed that my father couldn’t leave the house without buying something, which I took to be hyperbole until I made a point of observing him. It was literally true – even if it was just a bar of chocolate he would come back with a trophy.
“Inaccessible” because of the Wok, the 5-speed-juicer and the breadmaker [ed.'s note: you'd laugh if you nosed around our cellar], MM? Larf. Actually, I’ve nothing to say on the hoarding chromosome… I’m sure it’s responsible for us all being here (and not being fish, instead, or something). But what if you felt compelled to buy ever-newer replacement models for that espresso machine or the breadmaker and ended up with 5 of each and no end in sight? We’d see the absurdity. But, then… that wasn’t really my inspiration for the post, either. Something to do with fucking my wife and really liking it and wondering why that seems to be a non-standard position to take (npi)….
Germany’s flagship well-off pseudo-intellectual, Karl Lagerfeld, thinks this film is “Fellini-esque”. LOL, as the kiddies say. Still, it’s trashy fun (with great “sucking, spitty, swollen-lipped young sappho” sfx at 5:20) :
LYINTOLOGY as your OFFICIAL STATE RELIGION: HOW’S IT DOING SO FAR?
Recently, I posted these two remarks on my Facebook wall:
“The past few months of “News” cycle have been like being strapped to a chair in a garish theater and forced to watch the world’s crappiest, sleaziest, most moronic “comedy”… while most of the audience roars and hoots and cheers with approval.”
and
“As we all know, women never lie, men are always a pheromone-whiff away from rape, and governments never, ever resort to dirty tricks to achieve their sinister goals. Oh, and, most importantly: The Media is a composite organ of Truth and not a propaganda-machine of shameless hacks forever duping a witlessly credulous populace.”
I was also heard to say, to Comrade DJ Sensei Barry, during a long walk on a drizzly day:
“I don’t mind being on the losing side; what I hate is being on the losing side with a bunch of fucking retards.”
What did I mean by that? Forget that question for a moment and check out the Big News:
After over a decade of being hooked to a dialysis machine, freakishly-tall arch-fiend OBL was finally cornered in a compound in Pakistan, a few hundred meters from Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point (he probably hunched down, when pushing the dialysis machine into the compound the night he moved in, to remain inconspicuous). The Navy Seals (representing the most technologically-advanced military machine in the Solar System) were not only unable to capture OBL alive (using any of the creepy-cool riot-busting tech they use on G20 protestors… the sonic canons, microwave guns, the net-shooters, the knockout gas, et al)… they were too afraid to hold on to the body, in case anyone should need proof it was OBL they killed, for more than a few hours.
So afraid of the wrath of evil Muslim supermen were the Navy Seals that they dumped that hot-potato corpse in the sea post fucking haste. I think they were probably scared shitless when they dumped him.
Like, “Fuck, did anyone see us? Let’s get the fuck out of here…!”
Also, dumping the most-wanted-corpse-on-Earth into the sea had something to do with respecting OBL’s religious beliefs.
Plus: they didn’t want evil Muslim supermen and fanatics to make pilgrimages to any official dirt-graves and they didn’t have time to come up with the useful idea of keeping the location of the body a secret for as long as they might need to. Or just, of course, storing the body in a freezer in the cellar of one of the many mind-bogglingly-heavily-fortified mega-bases they’re building in Afghanistan. They were under pressure because it was a last-minute thing involving no planning.
Also: no pictures or videos of the dead OBL, or the slightly-before-dead OBL, either. The absence of dead OBL snaps (with the exception of some “leaked” Photoshop jobs that were surely not leaked to supply a subliminal public impression of seeing OBL with heroic Seal bullets in his head) is explained thusly: we really don’t want to gross anybody out. The absence of live, pre-headshot snaps or video of OBL is down to this: the feed went dead at a ridiculously inopportune moment. And Navy Seals don’t have several digital cameras or any hi-tech stuff that could’ve done that job. Sorry! Perfectly reasonable.
The current President’s popularity ratings were abysmal before OBL was capped-and-dunked but they jumped to a healthy 60% (or something) after. Happy coincidental timing for the President!
Well.
Then the head of the IMF, on a personal visit to New York (meaning his Diplomatic Immunity was switched off just then: oh fuck), decided to rape a chambermaid during the early stages of his run for the highest office in France. Polls predicted the rapist trouncing Sarkozy and it just never occurred to the rapist that the maid he raped would report this rape to the police, ending his political ambitions and his job at the IMF in one fell swoop, forever. I want to say “That must be a pretty fucking hot maid” but rape, as we know, is not about sexual attraction: all men are always just one pheromone-whiff away from doing it. Especially swingers. Liking a bunch of sex = liking to rape = Socialist Jew Frog.
What was he thinking? Even worse, the heart-breakingly-African-single-mother-maid he raped (known, immediately, and presumption-of-innocence-skippingly, as the “victim“) is reported, by some sources, to be HIV-positive!
If only she’d had the presence of mind to shout “I have AIDS! Don’t sodomize me!” as the head of the IMF, raping on hostile territory (the President of America is, after all, Sarkozy’s chum and ally), dragged her around his suite, inflicting both anal and oral sodomy and trying to get her panties off (before the anal, presumably, unless he was using her panties as a makeshift cotton condom). Pretty slightly astonishing for a 60-year-old! Perhaps he took Viagra 30 minutes before the hapless, heart-breakingly-African-single-mother-maid blundered into his room, in a fit of evil prescience he must surely now regret.
What an insane old man! Threw it all away over a 32-year-old-single-mom-maid-with-AIDS when he was rich enough to indulge in any number of perversions that wouldn’t have jeopardized his professional and political lives! Didn’t he realize his goose was cooked the instant one of his Rightwing French enemies (who is somehow associated with the owner of the hotel the old rapist was staying in) tweeted about the rape… even before the first police report was filed? Didn’t he realize that Americans, being kind of easy-to-impress and slow-to-do-reading-based-research, would instantaneously believe any lurid allegations of rape against him, and that Patronizing White Liberal Persons with College Degrees only need to hear the phrase “heart-breakingly-African-single-mother-maid” to blossom with tear-filled orgasms of bien pensant empathy and side with the Convenient Government Narrative against him? These people are so smart and nice!
Didn’t he realize how many enemies he’d made as a semi-controversial head of the IMF? Didn’t he realize that the Americans (especially power-players in the Banking Sector) would have preferred an American (or a citizen of one of America’s defacto colonies) in that position, instead? Well, as luck would have it, that’s probably exactly what’s going to happen, now.
To anyone claiming this was a “set-up”… what could this heart-breakingly-African-single-mother-maidpossibly gain from lying about this horny old rich French rapist raping her? A hundred thousand bucks? A green card? Ridiculous!
Stupid old nutty old horny rapist Libertine Socialist Jew! Nearly as silly as that evil old Arab at the bottom of the sea!
Have I mentioned already they found porno videos (which will probably turn out to be in some part Queer and pedophiliac) in the dead submerged Arab’s electricity-free command bunker? And evil diaries?
WHEN LEFTIES GO FASCO or HIGHER BRAIN FUNCTIONS SHUT DOWN IN EDUCATED WHITE LIBERALS under CERTAIN PC CONDITIONS
One of the first things a defendant (or the Denounced) might notice, in a Fascist/Totalitarian setting, would be where the burden of proof shifts: upon her/him. This no-nonsense expedient is in deference to the Operators of the Fascist/Totalitarian setting because it removes an impediment to the instant gratification of tossing an Enemy of the Stat(us Quo) into a hole just as soon as said enemy can be snatched from his/her bed one morning (or in the middle of the night). One of the anti-Totalitarian safeguards in a “Free Society” is the presumption of innocence (and its corollary, Due Process): if someone (or The State) accuses you of a serious crime, the burden of proof is not only the accuser, but rises in proportion to the seriousness of the accusation. You’d think anti-Fascists would embrace and defend this standard. One would expect passionate defenses of this standard, most of all, from Left-leaning or Liberalish academics. But: sacre bleu! Not so… not so!
Watch a Fascist crystal form, before your very eyes, in a Facebook comment-thread hosted by (of all things) a Socialist journalist (to be referred to, hereafter, as CONFLICTED SOCIALIST HOST…!
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CONFLICTED SOCIALIST HOST__
It is impossible to despise BHL enough, or to mock him sufficiently. I’ve tried. (God knows I’ve tried.) It just can’t be done.
http://www.thedailybeast.com
No one knows if the IMF director is guilty of sexual assault—and by dragging him through the mud, politicians and the press are committing gross acts of injustice, says French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy.
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• Jim____
Recently, BHL wrote a preface for a collection of letters that BHL’s old teacher Louis Althusser had written to his wife Helene, whom of course was strangled by Althusser in 1980. Then again, BHL has been a vigorous defender of movie director Roman Polanski, and now, Strauss-Kahn. Don’t you see a pattern here?
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Something to be said for the presumption of innocence, though. And only a naif would find it impossible to notice the timing of this event (and DSK’s unmentioned run-in with, say, Geithner-and-crew re: Ireland’s debt crisis).
With friends like BHL, of course, who needs enemies? Dragging DSK’s case to the (subliminal) level of a man who has admitted to drugging-and-sodomizing a 13-year-old girl is not helpful.
But there’s something patronizing about treating any woman’s cry of “rape” as true-by-default and something pretty awful about treating all men as just a pheromone-whiff away from the crime. Not to mention the absurdity of suggesting (in the manner of so many Fundamentalist/ Puritan “editorials”) any kind of equivalence between “womanizing” and such violence.
Moments after Rightwingers tweeted the “scandal”, DSK was already a filthy beast and his accuser was already a heartbreaking “victim”. Part of this “travesty of justice” is politics… which is almost more forgivable than the part of it driven by mere laziness.
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• CONFLICTED SOCIALIST HOST__
I don’t have an opinion on DSK, as such — but the way BHL argues for his is almost self-parodic. Except that he’s already well beyond that.
He needs a Zodiac medallion on that chest hair, though. IMO.
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• Sam___
I’m starting to see some left-sectarian defenses of him, too. Apparently those of us who see a problem with forced oral sex are just infected with bourgeois puritanism. I’m convinced that the WSWS will jump to the defense of the next John Wayne Gacy.
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• CONFLICTED SOCIALIST HOST__
By the way, Thorstad has a letter in the new issue of Workers Vanguard. Two shudders for the price of one…
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• Steven Seven Augustine
“Apparently those of us who see a problem with forced oral sex…”
Isn’t that supposed to be qualified by the word “alleged”? Has the “judicial” system changed that much since I left (fled) the country…?
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• Sam____
Facebook is not the judicial system or a media outlet, so I don’t feel that I’m compelled to qualify what I think about the case in such a manner. Certainly that’s not the standard typically applied.
And I have good reason for thinking that, since not just this woman, but *several* women this pig’s been in a position of authority over have made similar allegations.
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• Malcolm ____
A single rape (which it sure as hell sounds like he committed) may not even be first on the list of crimes for which the head of the IMF should have to answer.
And BHL is just begging for some humiliating pie/face related reprisal.
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• Steven Seven Augustine
Anyone remember how “obvious” it was that those “ruling class” lacrosse players had raped that non-white stripper of the proletariat? Correct Class Politics aren’t a shortcut to the Truth… or clairvoyance. I kinda think that letting the Media run a super-fast kangaroo court-of-opinion smacks (or should) of Rightwing character assassination.
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• Steven Seven Augustine
I mean, yipes: I *expect* the Unlettered Masses to be susceptible to tabloid-fueled conclusion-jumping… but I’m astonished that people who should know better are so open to suggestion. Maybe if “journalists” held themselves to some standards (as in: *not* using the word “victim” until, possibly, *after* a trial)…?
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• Mary___
Steven, innocent till proven guilty, of course-but the crime as described has so many colonial overtones, I wouldn’t be surprised. I used to clean hotel rooms, too. People who stay in hotels of any kind tend to have very entitled, colonialist attitudes towards the maids, believe you me. The worst part of the job is the ever-present possibility of running into creepy freaky visitors on power trips. The power dynamic that the head of the IMF staying at an ultraswank hotel probably imposes on a room cleaner especially an immigrant woman from Guinea -that could so easily turn into literal rape. We already know he finds Rikers Island too declasse for his fine self-no one to “service” him there in his cell.
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• Steven Seven Augustine
Mary: you’ve added your context to help sharpen your own conclusion but what of the other context… of DSK as the head of a very troublesome (for the Geithner clan) IMF? DSK was, in some respects, a serious enemy of the Dollar-as-Global-Currency… this context, and his upcoming trip to Berlin, are important, too. And seriously under-reported. People are weighing in on this with only cursory exposure to the facts of a bigger picture.
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• Mary___
Doesn’t mean the man is not a rapist.
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Steven Seven Augustine
”Doesn’t mean the man is not a rapist.”
What I’d expect to rely on, in judging whether or not he is, is something a little more substantive, rational and actually fair than lurid tabloid insinuations and our secret PC prejudices. I’m especially shocked by the Puritanical edge to so much commentary equating the man’s (to Americans) “libertine” past to Rape. “Adultery” is not Rape. But most of the commentary I’ve read is issuing from a country in which a track-and-field coach was *fired* for letting a boy run topless.
Wait: is Paddy Chayefsky writing this thread? Any minute, Lee J. Cobb is going to come out and deliver an inspiring monologue about the beauty of justice, the dangers of herd-think and demagoguery and the lessons of l’affaire Dreyfus… ooops. That last one would be too fancy.
All kidding aside: depressing.
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Mary___
Steven, these are not “secret PC prejudices” nor “puritanism” nor a penchant for “lurid tabloid insinuations” on my part.You are right that being a “libertine” is not necessarily the same as being a rapist-but sometimes the behavior of a rapist is minimized and denied with talk of “libertinism.” I simply find the word of the alleged victim more credible, so far, than that of the alleged perpetrator. There’s no evident conspiracy that she was paid off by discreditors of Strauss-Kahn’s economic policies- so she has nothing to gain, really by coming forward. Even if she has papers, immigration status is always a precarious thing. Maids in many places are pressured not to voice complaints about customer behavior towards them-so she might have been risking her job, and the economic welfare of everyone who depends on her job. One in three women on this planet has suffered gender-based violence. Women of color, immigrants, and working class/poor/women in “service” jobs are among those especially at risk. If my first instinct is empathy for the evident victim here, I don’t think it’s anything to apologize for. about an hour ago • Like • 2 people
I’m no defender of DSK; I’m not his fan and no fan of the IMF (with or without DSK heading it). But I am terrified at A) how effortlessly-manipulated public opinion is and B) how quickly we become Junior Fascists in the name of a Good Cause.
I was intrigued about how the US tried to claim moral high ground as regards the assassination of Bin Laden.
Sneaking into another country and exacting capital punishment without trial seems only a hair’s breadth away from 9/11.
Bin Laden was a dangerous individual ( a UK educated, US supported dangerous individual at that ) but surely putting him on trial rather than re-enacting a Black Ops video game would have been the only way of attaining the moral high ground.
As regards DSK – I’m unconvinced that a maid would walk into a room and within minutes want to have sex with a semi-gnarled bloke like him BUT he is innocent until proven otherwise and given the speculation-gone-out-of-control in the media I can’t see how a fair trial is even possible.
Re: DSK as sex-magnet: obviously not. But between that obvious “no” and the possible “yes” of the rape charge, there’s a plausible third answer. I’m no defender of Julian Assange (who is, in my opinion, either a witting-or-unwitting agent of disinformation), but the timing (and circumstances) of *his* rape charges were just as fishy. DSK may be some mutant form of evil Capitalist Socialist, but nothing I’ve read about him before now has indicated that the man was fucking insane. And he’d have to be, given his immediate political ambitions, to have done what he is accused of doing, where and when he is accused of doing it.
Context is always important when drawing conclusions (whether or not the final truth is even knowable). Enormous amounts of power are always in the balance as covert battles rage above our Serfy little heads, IMO, and “dirty tricks” are part of the arsenal. We’re encouraged to be naive; we’re encouraged to see The World through a sort of quaintly antique Billy Wilder filter in which the lowest lows are embodied by nasty old Mr. Potter in “It’s A Wonderful Life”. I can’t see the world that way, any more.
If the maid had come forward (herself and not as an abstraction with no face, no name, no direct statement in her own words, verbatim) with a tale that was all-but-buried by mainstream press, it wouldn’t strike me as so absurd; I’d be inclined to consider as more likely. Knowing how the world usually works, there are far too many red flags and herrings in the case as it has been presented, thus far. One thing I find amazing/ridiculous are the headlines accorded the maid’s lawyer every time he makes the statement “IT WAS NOT CONSENSUAL” or “IT WAS NOT ENTRAPMENT”. As if her lawyers would inform us if it were. As if being a headline makes it true. Where are DSK’s supporting counter-headlines? I smell smear.
The burden of proof is on her… she (aka her team) has to make a plausible case that it wasn’t consensual, that this isn’t entrapment.
No one can suddenly accuse you, Comrade ET, of stealing their car or bashing their face in, and have you tossed, within hours, into prison over it, without some pretty compelling evidence: words alone (or even your fingerprints on their car or face) won’t stitch you up. But there’s PC Hysteria around Rape, I’m afraid, and the burden of proof (unconstitutionally, in the US) is suddenly on the (invariably male) Defendant. I don’t think it serves Feminism (or Justice, in general) to cordon Rape off as a constitutional-rights-neutralizer; we need to fix that (which would mean Society would have to mature, psycho-sexually, to the extent that female Rape victims are no longer stigmatized and treated, a la mountain-villages-in-Iran, like damaged goods) . Rape should/must be treated like any other violent crime and the presumption of innocence must hold.
Now, bearing the context of this particular case in mind, if DSK’s powerful enemies had, indeed, wanted to stitch him up in the most cost-effective way possible, having an African maid accuse him of Rape could not be bested. Hard to discuss that in mixed company without flirting with pariah-hood, but it’s true (which illustrates neatly how taboos of any nature almost invariably protect and advance Rightist programs: if you can’t even discuss something, you are living in some degree of Fascist Paradise).
I think this is an interesting essay (excerpted) on the DSK matter:
“I have written about the anomalies of the case. One of the most striking is the confirmed reports in the French and British press that a political activist for French President Sarkozy, Jonathan Pinet, tweeted the news of Strauss-Kahn’s arrest to Arnaud Dassier, a spin doctor for Sarkozy, before the news was announced by the New York police.
“Pinet’s explanation for how he was the first to know is that a “friend” in the Sofitel Hotel, where the alleged crime took place, told him. Is it merely a coincidence that the men assigned the task of removing the Strauss-Kahn threat to French President Sarkozy’s re-election had a clued-in friend in the Sofitel Hotel? Did the police clue-in the “friend” before they made the public announcement? If so, why?
“What bothers me about the Strauss-Kahn affair is that if the police have evidence that supports their insistence on his guilt, it is pointless for the police to set Strauss-Kahn up in the media. Generally, set-ups like this occur only when there is no evidence or when the evidence has to be fabricated and cannot withstand examination.
“As a person who had a Washington career, I find other aspects of the case disturbing. Strauss-Kahn had emerged as a threat to the establishment. Polls showed that as the socialist candidate, he was the odds-on favorite to defeat the American candidate, Sarkozy, in the upcoming French presidential election. Perhaps it was only electoral posturing to help defeat Sarkozy, but Strauss-Kahn indicated that he intended to move the International Monetary Fund away from its past policy of making the poor pay for the mistakes of the rich. He spoke of strengthening collective bargaining, and of restructuring mortgages, tax and spending policies in order that the economy would serve ordinary people in addition to the banksters. Strauss-Kahn said that regulation needed to be restored to financial markets and implied that a more even distribution of income was required.
“These remarks, together with a likely win over Sarkozy in the French election, made Strauss-Kahn a double-barreled challenge to the establishment. The third strike against him was the recent IMF report that said China would surpass the US as the world’s first economy within five years. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/imf-bombshell-age-of-america-about-to-end-2011-04-25
“People who haven’t spent their professional life in Washington may not understand the threat to Washington that is in the IMF report. Whether deserved or not, the IMF has a lot of credibility. By placing China as the number one economic power by the end of the next US presidential term, the IMF thrust a dagger through the heart of American hegemony. Washington’s power is based on America’s economic supremacy. The IMF report said that this supremacy was at its end.
“This kind of announcement tells the political world that, as the headline read, “the age of America is over.” For the first time in decades, other countries can see the prospect of escaping from US domination. They don’t have to be puppet states, part of the hegemonic empire. They see the prospect of serving their own people and their own interests instead of those of Washington. European countries, for example, forced to fight for Washington in Afghanistan and Libya, see light at the end of the tunnel. They can now think about refusing.
“Although rich and a member of the establishment, and independently of his behavior toward women, Strauss-Kahn made the mistake of revealing that he might have a social conscience. Either this social conscience or the hubris of power led him to challenge American supremacy. This is an unforgivable crime for which he is being punished.
“My friend, Alexander Cockburn, an intelligent and civilized person who is derided by right-wingers as a communist, lacks my experience of Washington. Consequently, he thinks that the facts will come out, although he seems to prefer that they come out on the side of the maid and not Strauss-Kahn.
“If Alex were the Bolshevik he is said to be, he would know that no high-ranking figure who was serving the establishment would be destroyed on the basis of the word of an immigrant maid living in a sub-let apartment in a building for aids victims. The very notion that the US establishment craves justice to this extent is a total absurdity. Americans are so indifferent to injustice that the American public shrugs off the hundreds of thousands and millions of women, children, and village elders who are murdered, maimed, dispossessed, and displaced by the US military in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and wherever Washington and the military/security complex, while feeding on power and profit, can claim to be protecting Americans from “terrorists” or bringing democracy to the heathen.
“The American criminal justice system is riddled with wrongful convictions and stinks of injustice. The US has a much higher rate of incarceration than alleged authoritarian regimes, such as China, and routinely destroys the lives of young people, and even mothers of small children, for using drugs.
“Strauss-Kahn’s indictment serves emotional needs of conservatives, left-wingers, and feminists as well as establishment agendas. Conservatives don’t like the French, because they did not support the US invasion of Iraq. The left-wing doesn’t like rich white guys and IMF officials, and feminists don’t like womanizers. But even if the government’s case falls apart in the courtroom, Strauss-Kahn has been removed from the French presidential race and from the IMF. This, not justice for an immigrant, is what the case is about.
“Many Americans are unable to comprehend that authorities would remove a threat with a frame-up. But far worst has occurred. Francesco Cossiga, a former President of Italy, revealed that many of the bombings in Europe during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, which were blamed on communists, were in fact “false flag” operations carried out by the CIA and Italian intelligence in order to scare voters away from the communist party. Cossiga’s revelations resulted in a parliamentary investigation in which intelligence operative Vincenzo Vinciguerra stated: “You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple: to force the public to turn to the state to ask for greater security.”
If democratic governments will murder innocents for political reasons, why wouldn’t they frame someone? Whether innocent or guilty, Strauss-Kahn has been framed in advance of his trial.”
UPDATE 2:If you can’t orchestrate a Rape, Adulterous Sex Will Do: look at this example (supplied by Comrade Barry): remember the Larry Craig “scandal”?
On June 11, 2007, Craig was arrested at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport on suspicion of lewd conduct.[5] The nature of the alleged activity has been categorized by some as cottaging.[6] According to the police report, the police officer sat in a bathroom stall as part of an undercover operation investigating complaints of sexual activity in the restroom. After about 13 minutes of sitting in the stall, the police officer observed Craig lingering outside and frequently peeking through the crack of the door on the stall. Craig then entered the stall to the left of the officer’s stall. The police officer made the following observations, which he recorded in his report of the incident, as to what happened next:
At 1216 hours, Craig tapped his right foot. I recognized this as a signal used by persons wishing to engage in lewd conduct. Craig tapped his toes several times and moves his foot closer to my foot. … The presence of others did not seem to deter Craig as he moved his right foot so that it touched the side of my left foot which was within my stall area. Craig then proceeded to swipe his left hand under the stall divider several times, with the palm of his hand facing upward.[5]
According to the incident report and criminal complaint filed in court,[7][8][9] the officer showed Craig his police identification beneath the partition separating their stalls, and the officer then pointed his finger towards the restroom exit. Craig initially said no, but he ultimately complied with the officer’s request to leave the restroom. After Craig and the officer left the restroom, Craig was reluctant to go with the officer and demanded the officer show his police identification a second time. Once the officer complied with the request, Craig, the arresting officer, and a police detective, who was stationed outside of the restroom, went to the airport police station.[5]
Ignore how innocuous the whole thing seems (or should seem) while bearing in mind that Sen. Craig disappeared from politics, and public discourse, soon after this event. Trawling for a pissoir fuck (or appearing to) merely looks like bad luck/poor judgment on the former Senator’s part until we consider the context:
Bush is also angry with Craig, a conservative who joined with Democrats in a filibuster to defeat permanent renewal of the Patriot Act. As a meeting recently, Bush referred to Craig as “a goddamned traitor” and told the National Republican Senatorial Committee to start recruiting someone to run against the Idaho Senator in 2008.
Such anger against those who dare oppose him is typical for a President who all too often launches into obscene tirades when his policies are questioned. Bush, on many occasions, has called political opponents “traitors” and, in private, refers to Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter as a “lily-livered bastard.”
Craig, however, is unfazed by all this and says the Patriot Act “doesn’t do enough to protect the civil liberties of innocent Americans.”
Again: this is the sort of thing which is constantly going on over our Serfy little heads but, back in 2007, when Craig fell into his trap, most of us only noticed that some politician had been busted for trying to suck cock, or something, and we tut-tut-tutted and moved on. We always move on.
Yesterday’s Insults are Tomorrow’s Compliments: The Unexpurgated Version
1592: The first printed appearance of the phrase “Once upon a time,” in its original German form, Es war einmal, is traceable to a village in the region of the Spreewald, via a press in Strassburg. The printing of the phrase was at the expense of Victor’s ancestor, Konstantin von Lehde, a wealthy brewer who published a dozen copies of his collected Märchen (fairytales), as well as later financing the printing of a pocket Bible ideal for itinerant tradesmen, who, although they may not have been able to read the little book, carried it in their pockets as a protective talisman for their travels. Konstantin von Lehde’s fairytales were burlesqued transcriptions of stories he remembered from his childhood, some for children, others not, and copies of the book, printed on vellum, were distributed among members of his extended family as reminders of his wealth, learnedness, generosity, and wit.
1830: The von Lehde clan had migrated, largely, to nearby Berlin and then from Berlin to America, “fleeing the Jews,” (as Victor’s father gleefully put it) in the middle of the 19th century, taking their place, among the Germans of Wisconsin, with the anglicized name of Leader.
1930: An original copy of the von Lehde book of fairytales remained in the Leader family until well into the twentieth century, when it vanished from the custodianship of Victor’s great-grandfather, Jacob Emmanuel Gustave Leader, the bushy-mustached patriarch at the time the clan was brought low by the Great Depression. He was rumored to have bartered the rare book for nothing less sensible than a barrel of heating oil. All that remains of the heirloom is a loosely bound copy of the book’s first tale, inscribed on yellowing paper, itself now an heirloom, written exquisitely, most probably in Jacob Emmanuel Gustave Leader’s own fine, waltzing hand; a faintly recognizable corruption of Rumpelstiltskin (or “Rumpenstinzschen”).
Eine frischvermählte junge Frau läuft vom Wasserholen aus der dörflichen Quelle durch den finsteren Wald nach Hause…
A newly married young woman was walking home through the forest after a trip to the village well. She was blonde as straw and white as moonlit snow, with eyes more blue than a teapot. Out of boredom she took an unfamiliar path through the forest and glimpsed, over a high garden wall, a ripe red bunch of cherries. Seeing the ripe cherries, she realized how hungry she was, and, putting down her bucket of water, climbed the garden wall to partake. In the midst of straddling the wall and partaking, she was startled by a hideously black man in a large hat, the master of the garden. The hideously black man, or mannikirk, had her fast by the toe, never to let her to go.
Let me go! Cried the newlywed. But the mannikirk only laughed and cried the word “higher!” and seized her by the ankle instead.
Let me go! Cried the newlywed. But the mannikirk only laughed and cried the word “higher!” and seized her by the calf instead.
Let me go! Cried the newlywed. But the mannikirk only laughed and cried the word “higher!” and seized her by the knee instead.
Finally, the poor newlywed fainted in a rapture of sheer terror. When she came to again, the ugly black creature agreed to grant her freedom, but only if she promised her first-born child in exchange for this clemency. Failing to take such a promise seriously, she made it easily, and the mannikirk freed her. She hurried home with the bucket of water and revealed nothing of the matter to her husband, the handsome woodcutter. The handsome woodcutter was blonde as butter, and white as milk in the morning, with eyes more blue than a Robin’s eggs.
Monate vergehen und die wunderschöne Frischvermählte erwartet ein Kindlein…
Months went by and the beautiful young newlywed became heavy with child. She had forgotten all about the funny black man in the very large hat, when, quite unexpectedly, the very creature appeared at the door of her cottage. With the pomp and confidence of the mayor himself, he presented himself to the young woman’s husband, the handsome woodcutter, staking his claim on the child soon to be born.
Knowing nothing of the black creature’s prior encounter with his young wife, the husband laughed and prepared to fetch the mannikirk a bracing kick to the seat of his britches. The mannikirk, however, asserted his claim, and the wife was forced to confess, in tears, to her husband. The black fellow allowed that the only way out of the bargain was to guess his true name before the birth of the child, which he was quite confident was an impossible thing to do.
Aber der Ehemann ist klug und folgt dem Mannikirk zu einer dunklen Höhle im Wald…
The handsome woodcutter, however, cleverly followed the mannikirk to a cave in the forest, in front of which boiled a pot. Concealed in the bushes, the brave and clever husband kept a close eye on the mannikirk until nightfall, whereupon the peculiar black creature removed its large hat, revealing a pointy bald black head, and danced around the boiling pot, singing a song, confident that no one could see or hear it:
Call me hipche Flederlitz,
Purzinigele, Cavallius,
But if you want to solve my puzzle
Call me little Hopfenhütel!
A fortnight later, close on the birth of the child, the mannikirk appeared before the cottage driving a fine black carriage pulled by fine black horses, wearing a fine black coat and the finest black overlarge cap with a raven’s black feather in it, patiently waiting to collect its prize. The husband came out of the cottage and greeted the black creature as Little Hopfenhütel, its proper name, whereupon the mannikirk flew into an unimagineable rage. It accuses the young couple of cheating to default on a promise, abused them with blasphemous oaths, and rode off in a fury, at which the astonished young wife and husband could do nothing but laugh with relief and dance with joy, singing:
Call him hipche Flederlitz,
Purzinigele, Cavallius,
But if you want to solve his puzzle
Call him little Hopfenhütel!
Es ist allerdings der Mannikirk, der am Ende lacht…
It was the mannikirk who had the last laugh, however, as the fair young mother, whose hair was blond as straw and whose skin was white as moonlit snow and whose eyes were more blue than a teapot, gave birth, the very next day, to a babe as black as a raven, even blacker than the blackest night in the black forest.
Search as they might, high and low, in the village and in the forest, the poor young couple could not find the mannikirk to relieve them of the terrible duty of raising the changeling as their own, leaving the young wife to regret her greed, and the husband to regret his cleverness, forever.
The End.
He’s in the middle of painting the fourth in a series of large canvasses based on Little Hopfenhütel, the crumbling paper copy of which he keeps in a vault, with a copy/translation of the copy pinned to a bulletin board next to the blackboard he keeps in the studio. The series is the first representational work he’s done in thirty years, though it hovers, still, on the verge of abstraction, devoid of trompe l’oeil effects or Renaissance perspective and emphasizing concentrated patches of black. Black, and enamel-red for the cherries, and also red for detailed pudendal diagrams and schematics plus the leitmotif of birth’s gushing blood, flowing (and furling) neatly in Hokusai waves. Black and red over ash-white or bone-gray and textured with cross-hatchings which are scratches and rips in the canvas.
Little Hopfenhütel is either a rich layer cake of obscure psychological allusions and symbols keyed to the medieval Germanic mind or a rather more obvious allegory of infidelity; of marital stealth, lies and race betrayal. He’d decided to paint it both ways.
Today is his Death day.
The journalist has big tits but he doesn’t care. Or only slightly. Honestly, he can’t remember how he feels about big tits. Big white Aryan tits. Does he really not care? What is it about big white tits that he still manages to care about, if care about them he does? He feels (inspired by her big tits perhaps) like making a declaration. A fuck-you-and-everything-else speech. He wants to say:
-Thirty million years of evolution on Earth and your primary concern is getting a job? This is the question The Artist throws in your stupid face. Or the question that Victor Leader throws in your stupid face. A controlled aesthetic fury regarding the fairytale of civilization in its futile response to existence. The art itself is excreted from the lower bowels of my furious mind, basically. I sell the shit and selling it gives me power. I use the power to tell civilization to fuck off. I use the power to sleep late, dress how and if I like, break minor laws with impunity and fuck whom I want, where and how I want, as often as I want to fuck…
The End.
But (and this is true) his mustache prevents him. Noa likes it, the mustache, she likes the colonial allusions it throws off, but if it weren’t for Noa he’d shave it. Wearing a mustache renders making fuck-you speeches perilous. Opens him to ridicule unless he remains within a narrow range of gestures and poses and modes of speech. People tittering, laughing uncontrollably, before you’re halfway through it. It wasn’t always thus. Instead of the fuck-you-and-everything-else speech he says, with his deep, distinctive, lens-grinding, cigarette-sculpted voice:
“The artist’s role in society remains to remain outside of it.”
She sticks the recorder closer to his mouth for emphasis and asks him if he’s come to Northern Europe for the light, and his half-smiled answer (which he’s used twice before, in other interviews; if she was a real journalist or even just a reader of art rags she’d have known that) is “No, I came for the healthcare.”
-The light I paint with is in my mind, etc.
He hates what he hears sometimes when he hears himself being interviewed. The stock faux-mystic replies. His left hand rests palm-down on his thick denim crotch in the manner of a Polish workman in his afterwork beergarden slouch. The fingers do a little fan-dance from time to time for emphasis and she glances but otherwise doesn’t react. He still can’t believe he’s 62. He has a fading blonde crewcut and a fading blonde mustache and the ruddy complexion of a khaki-clad Boer.
Dick Haymes is singing You’ll Never Know.
The Jesus Freak is shuffling up Rosenthaler Strasse.
Item: Tod is snug in his big black British monstrosity, navigating from the villa in Potsdam, listening to a mixtape, a cassette from 1987, a chrome tape at full blast with the Dolby C on, the muffled fidelity of dinosaur Dolby C, just waiting for something, some phrasework or attitude or production gimmick to fire his imagination. Human League; Jene Loves Jezebel; Lene Lovich; Sparks. More than once he resists the urge to veer off the road and drive unharmed through the wall of one of the anal white cottages that nestle behind their hedges in a Teutonic row. The beast is that solid. A militarized Humber Pullman limousine, a lightly-armored staff car intended for North Africa, used by the mayor of Plymouth, mint condition, modern engine, bomb proof, if he floored it and wrenched the steering hard to the right and just detoured through some German’s hideously tasteful living room and out into the garden and down the alley he’d barely feel the jolts.
Q: Mr. Spectre, tell me, if you hate the Germans so much, why keep a home in Germany?
A: I think it was Machiavelli who said that one should always keep one’s enemies near. Ditto one’s collectors.
He’s the biggest Art Star in Deutschland.
Today is his Death day, too.
Midway through the Q&A. The interview is conducted in a corner of the studio where Victor has covered practically everything, except the bar stools on which they sit, with sheets (the canvases, significant objects, rough sketches, the bulletin board and the blackboard with ghostly pentimenti of half-erased notes misting over it…anything that might provide a clue to the new series), and Victor asks her, again, which magazine he is being interviewed for. And she is laughably vague about it, stammering a little; blushing, even.
Do terrorists blush?
The standard German insolence of her generation towards his is the most reassuring aspect of her performance. He is fairly certain, at least, that she isn’t some fair-haired Iranian sleeper agent come to blow him up, or an operative for some bureau keeping track of his anti-American pronouncements, though he can’t rule out her being some kind of cool, postmodern detective sent by his ex-wife Gundi to seduce him into admitting that his income is roughly three times greater than he is swearing to in the divorce proceedings. Her insolence is possibly also a German’s idea of flirting, though he doesn’t rule out the pawn-takes-rook variation that he is being set up for being drugged mid-fuck and kidnapped by cash-strapped, latte-fueled descendants of the RAF.
He has his suspicions. As does everyone in the 21st century.
It is early afternoon and the high white hunger-buzz aerates his thoughts as the burst yolk of the late-summer sun ooze across the soot-frosted panes of the angled skylight. He is so hungry he wants to bite her sugar-frosted cheek, but he isn’t about to invite her to a decent lunch, so he starves through the interview, or “the interview”, hoping at least to be spared his borborygmus, as much as he loves the word, though the studio’s expensive silence works against him, exposing them both to noises like they’ve never heard. Sounds like muffled (Dolby’d) genocide in a distant village down there in his lower intestinal tract but they both pretend not to notice.
To N.K. in appreciation of her terrible penmanship.
On the wall behind the journalist’s head was a handwritten note from Noa (some inspiring quote or other; pithy words from some great DWM) and Victor wanted to ask the journalist to look at it and tell him if in her honest opinion that looked like terrible penmanship to her.
The big-titted Aryan “journalist” asks about his super-famous friend Tod Spectre; how long they’ve known each other; how they met; his opinion of Spectre’s work; hardly the questions of an initiate. Passing the recorder from her lips to his (he’s sure he can smell her saliva on the grille of the microphone) she wants to discuss his interpretation of Canto V, Tod’s three hundred and eighty-pound, fully-functional, scaled-to-humans iron, oak, copper and steel model of a mousetrap. Five dollars of genuine American currency set in a crisp note on the mousetrap’s trigger as bait. If he agrees with certain critics that it’s anti-Semitic.
She asks Victor about his Allah series and if it signaled a return to large-scale canvases, painted in soaky daubs with sponges, and what the dishwater-gray washes, applied in so many layers, represent, if not breath or ectoplasm or even a liquid representation of the drabness of the modern soul.
Victor shrugs. His fingers do the fan-dance: “If I could talk it, I wouldn’t have to paint it.”
Item: Tod is penetrating the outer rings of greater Berlin, ringing up Simon, listening to the Bauhaus cover of Telegram Sam full blast, feeling bawdy and rich and young.
Item: Simon will answer the phone with mock-comedic gruffness. Without the distancing cushion of the mock-comedic gruffness filter, Simon’s life would be a horror.
He alone of the friends will have survived this warm blue late September afternoon.
122,056 people, around the world, will die, of various causes, before midnight, CET.
The End.
Most artists want to talk about The Work, not the private life, but Victor has very little to say about The Work. He prefers to extemporize on current events, philosophical pedantry, gossip, the work of other painters, his early struggles, personal setbacks and boyhood reminiscences. He very much enjoys discussing his father, the former chief deputy with the Sheriff’s Department of Busch County, Wisconsin, the surprisingly-light-on-his-feet bear whose bushy white eyebrows decorated eyes as blue as the eyes of the poet Robert Frost; as blue as the eyes of the interviewer’s herself or as blue as the blue in the eyes of the young newlyweds in Little Hopfenhütel. Though blue is not a part of the palette for his work in this series.
Tod says “blue” is a Disney color and Victor agrees. They never use it. Simon uses it a lot.
Whenever Victor thinks of Konstantin von Lehde, which is often, these days, usually while he works, he sees his father, Charlie, dressed in medieval finery, sloshing a vortex of ale in a big stein with one hand and cradling an exotic-looking pipe in the other and telling racist jokes between puffs and gulps. Only back then they would have been mostly about hornéd Jews, the jokes. But they wouldn’t have been jokes. Did people tell jokes in the Middle Ages?
Is his girlfriend cheating on him with a writer? With a fucking scribbler?
“Listen, the truth is, hiding inside every wildly successful art-huckster with a cynical gallerist and a Swiss bank account is a visionary artist on a quest. All the success in the world doesn’t mollify whatever real world wound or sense of estrangement that drove the artist into the fairytale kingdom of his imagination in the first place. Look at Picasso.”
“Picasso?”
“Don’t sneer. The less people in the so-called art world talk about Picasso, the more relevant he is. He’s more relevant than ever. When was the last time you discussed gravity? Picasso is gravity. He’s also the bridge between the supreme accomplishments of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries and the talentless stuff we’re doing. The gesture-plotting and idea-spinning. This bullshitty, high-IQ advertising.” He laughs. She doesn’t.
“Maybe you shouldn’t quote me on that.”
He wants her to say something that he can sneer at with open derision from behind his mustache. He wants to kick himself for talking so much; for being so voluble; for wearing a mustache. She is on some kind of power trip, this so-called journalist. Canny and laconic. Despite the strange blushing.
To N.K. in appreciation of her terrible penmanship.
He suddenly and vividly recalls happening across a magazine rolled up in a Black-and-Decker giftbox in the back of his father’s tool locker, in the garage, when he was 14 or 15, overwhelmed by the odor from his father’s shoe polish kit. Full-page earthtone photo of a well-oiled undressed pudding-smooth chocolate female with a massive Afro, on all fours, behind whom knelt a hairy, big-bellied redneck in a sheriff’s hat and in front of whom knelt a hairy, big-bellied redneck in a Klansman’s hood. You could hand-feed sugar cubes to deer through the backporch door of our house on Maple Lane. Father was legendary among the law enforcement workers of the state of Wisconsin for shooting a crow through his bathroom window while sitting on the can.
She glances at her watch and says, “You became an artist accidentally…”
“I was kicked out of art school because I could draw too well. Stuff looked too realistic. Heaved a cinder block through the back window of an instructor’s Cadillac. This was long before car alarms, mind you. Anyway, the other thing I did was vandalize a painting in a local exhibition with permanent markers and the gallerist tracked me down because he liked what I’d done better than the original painting. Hired me to vandalize more of the same artist’s stuff. A very 1974 story. Couldn’t happen now. Now you’d go to jail and pay damages.”
“I hope it won’t count as sexual harassment if I comment at this point that your hair is… incredible… ?”
Victor has a mustache.
Victor’s girlfriend is bald.
(A youngish Sinatra is singing.)
Victor’s mother sniffed at Charlie’s corpse in the over-sized casket. As though it was a clever-but-unconvincing fake. She sing-songed, from behind her alcohol-scented veil, “That’s not Charlie,” but that big dead body right there was Charlie Leader; it would still be Charlie Leader when it had rotted away into a busted xylophone of gummy brown bones, for Charlie Leader would be nowhere else to be found, not anywhere else in the totality of the Universe, his precise location anything but a mystery. That was Charlie Leader right there.
(Frank, then Tony, then Vic. All the old dreamsongs.)
His beloved father. As queers-and-coons-hating as anyone could expect a chief deputy of the Sheriff’s Department of Busch County, Wisconsin, in the middle of the 20th century, to be. This was a man who referred to crows as “niggerwigs,” and found a symbolic purpose in shooting them whenever he could, although Victor had loved him, looked up to him, sought his canny guidance through most of the old man’s life. When you edited out his one peculiar (and some would say humanizing) flaw; the virulent racism; he’d been the noblest, wisest man who’d ever walked the earth. One might even have called him a proto-feminist. Victor recalled clearly the old man washing the dishes late at night, coming in after a long day; washing the dishes quietly with his back to everything and his pistols dangling like barbells from his waist and mother calling out from her interrupted snooze on the sofa, illuminated in black and white by a swinging Steve Allen or a gesticulating Jack Parr, you know you don’t have to do that, Charlie.
Charlie would wink down at the boy on the stool beside him and keep right on scrubbing.
His poor father chained by civil law to the doughy white pile of the body his wife was reduced to being and which Victor himself had had a hand in ruining, merely by being born. Vic remembered what a big deal it had been to drive into town and see Goldfinger, in 1962, his father dreaming out loud, as it were, in public, in the deep velour seats of The Odeon, the cars and the pussy and the license to kill. He smiled in the middle of the interview, remembering it. Both wearing dinner jackets and entering the theater with a certain manly decorum. Victor must have been about fifteen. One of the supposed big deals of James Bond had been his “license to kill,” a discretionary freedom of some distinction back in 1962, no doubt, but everyday traffic cops had that now. Every school kid or customs agent with one good eye.
Sometimes he felt it, drifting off to sleep, a kind of rusty radiance glowing over the rim of the western horizon. America and all of her tensions, lighting up the sky. That horny teen homicidal vitality. An ocean that wasn’t nearly wide enough.
The End.
James Bond. Foreign blondes with big tits showing sudden, unbelievable compliance. Victor pretends to misunderstand.
Item: Tod punches redial to remind Simon to bring his copy of the book.
Item: Simon strains in mock-comedic agony on the toilet.
(Tony Bennett.)
(Brook Benton.)
He comes in an iffy fashion. Can the viscous be said to trickle? Definitive proof that white lips just don’t do it for him. Victor says, softly, sadly, in the timbre and cadence of an alcoholic remembering out loud,
“The quiescent dick is a frog. The Prince, smooth, upright, tall and … strong…”
She doesn’t realize. She is slurping too loud to hear him and he pushes her face so gently away. She shifts back on her haunches and backhands her salivaslick chin and says, flinty German accent intact, “Well, what we have here is still a frog, despite of my best efforts,” and sort of flicks at it half-humorously as he helps her to her feet, amazed that a woman can remain so insolent after having held so harmless a dick melted on her tongue for longer than a minute.
Victor points. “Whoa. Is that thing still on?”
(Johnny Mathis and his weakly-yodeled Chances Are.)
“Anything you’d like to say in conclusion?”
“What if I say I won’t let you walk out of here with that?”
“What if I say my karate expert boyfriend is waiting outside in the taxi?”
He watches her repair her lipstick with the semi-grimace of calculation.
“Okay. How much?”
“How much of what?”
“How much for the tape, obviously.”
“The tape? This tape? This tape is not for sale. It’s a masterpiece. Can’t you just see it? ‘A brave new direction’… ? A fresh new…”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“It’s not quite a 1974 kind of story, I admit… ” Packing the recorder away. Zipping her top. “But a story, nevertheless, I think.”
The End.
Victor wants to stab her through the heart, and calculates, quickly, if he’d get away wth it, then wonders, in a fleeting panic, where a knife is. The very sharp old deli knife he keeps for the bread, cheese and the salami he eats for quick lunch while working. The one he takes such retrograde pleasure in sharpening. Picasso would kill her.
“I will send you an invitation to the Vernissage. I can put you on the list. Plus one?”
He’d forgotten how much he hated Performance Art.
(Sammy. Candy Man.)
2
Victor knocks on Noa’s door with his left hand and aims his phone at the door with his right, watching the left hand through the viewfinder. The hand looks smaller, slightly green, and far away. It operates in a different time continuum; a kindler, gentler era; a few milliseconds behind. He enjoys the sensation and knocks again just to watch himself doing it. It suddenly hits him that he’s still wearing his wedding ring.
At Noa’s place on the previous weekend, he’d blown a Rorschach of Berlin soot into a tissue with his trumpeter’s hunch in her WC when what should he espy but a book tossed atop a tower of white towels, a brand new hardbound book, thick as a bible, sitting on the towels where she obviously hadn’t meant to leave it.
Her face is all mouth, little eyes, stub nose; she enters a room with her lips. She is the most beautiful thing he’s ever laid eyes on. He’s always, all over again, knocked out by her looks; even after brief trips to her bathroom (hung with big-name-photographer portraits of her) he comes back grateful, as though he’s been gone for years. Her face remains a shock (the difference between the profoundly beautiful and the profoundly ugly being that you never get used to the former), burns a hole through his memory and falls out and he dives after it, like a boy, breathless, as it burns clear through to the center of his libido. That beautiful. He’d said, casually, hefting the book,
“Mind if I borrow this?”
…but the look he got in response indicated that he’d made some sort of discovery.
“It’s for my mother.”
That look of how should I look. Well, was it a porno? Embarrassingly lowbrow masscult tripe? Noa often accused Victor of testing her… challenging her intellect… which was simply her paranoid self-consciousness about that heavy Nigerian accent of hers coming out. The fetching insecurity. The accent Victor found sexy as hell and wouldn’t have changed even if it was possible to do so with the push of a button. He considered her to be one of the sharpest girls he’d ever (ahem) come across, though deeply learnéd in a book-sense: no. But so what? She was a prodigy of the emotions. That thick black blood of hers. Her preposterously fat mother Nelke.
To N.K. in appreciation of her terrible penmanship.
-What?
More than the dedication, it was the last offering in the collection which gave Victor his hairs-on-the-back-of-his-neck moment. There’s a woman in the story, a black woman, a Nigerian model by the name of Sadie, an atom-by-atom, vowel-by-vowel transcription of Noa. Sadie Olubodun was different from Noa Kiko in only two details: hair and name. Noa kept her shiny black skull shaved clean, like a chess piece, whereas this “Sadie” creature had had her kinky African hairs straightened into a flowing chemical mane. Everything else was one-to-one. A portrait. A chiding, loving, detailed portrait.
This character “Sadie” moves from a relationship with a loutish German who suffers, occasionally, from diabetic seizures, to a portly British artist named Simon, of all things, who’s worried about his career, and who, therefore, deliberately provokes Muslims with anti-Islamic paintings in order to trigger global fame (though the fact was, in Victor’s case, Muslims had come out, to everyone’s shock, to say how much they liked the non-representational paintings, though you couldn’t count on such reasonableness in all of them). Wasn’t it true that Noa used to joke that the only thing she missed about her German ex was how sweet his diabetic semen was? Like blowing the Easter Bunny?
His next move is tracking down the publisher.
What really gets to Victor is the possibility that this pseudonymous writer prick (N.E. Boddhi: har har) has noticed a cute little detail about Noa that Victor himself hasn’t. Is Noa’s penmanship really so awful?
Even worse is the possibility of a coded irony; that the prickscribe finds her penmanship exquisite, rather, and had written odes to it or perhaps…yes…Noa had written out inspiring quotes for him like she’d once done for Victor, though she’d stopped that years ago, because that’s the sort of thing a lover only bothers with in the beginning, isn’t it? During the golden age of the affair. Before everything turns to pleasant, odorless, room-temperature shit. Victor is seriously thinking about killing his girlfriend.
He knocks again and leaves the building. Rings Tod. Is Tod early? Late? Still looking for parking? Is Simon with him?
Love and Death: the oft-invoked twins. Eros and Thanatos. But that’s wrong. The dark twin of Sex isn’t Death, but Murder.
Item: Victor and Tod watch as a skinny old man slips into the bistro. Skinny old man in dark clothing with a white beard and a zombie’s grin. One of those U-Bahn pests they both recognize from twenty years ago, before they could afford big cars, or baronial flats so near to everything that they could afford the luxury of walking. Old man’s toting a heavy briefcase with the words Ask Me About Jesus stenciled on it. The fact that even snob joints like Chez Guevara don’t have the guts to hustle beggars postfuckinghaste off the premises Victor construes as yet another of the many delayed reactions, in Berlin’s daily life, to Nazism.
Tod, in his trademark suit and sandals, rolls his eyes and tells Victor a story while they wait for Simon to show up.
“Big investor with his, umm, trophy nanny asks Manny,” Tod’s gallerist, “for the most au courant, cutting-edge, oven-fresh , umm, Tod Spectre money can buy. He wants to be ahead of the pack and, umm, money is simply no object… he wants tomorrow’s work and he’s willing to pay for the privilege. Manny takes him back to the vault and shows him the thing that’s not even ready yet… a kid up in Hamburg is still hammering out the, umm, code. The Jehovah Virus. You know, it’s not even a material object… it’s a lot of ohs and ones floating in this shiny silver dog-dick dongle, right? Manny quotes a price and the collector goes, umm, white. Even the, umm, nanny goes white.”
Tod, who made it a habit to bring a snack along whenever he lunched at Chez Guevara (because the service was that bad) offered Victor a bite of his Snickers bar. Victor declined and watched Tod finish it off, talking while chewing it, the webbed filaments of caramel stitching his pallet to a writhing tongue.
“But, umm, he wrote the check. Manny had an orgasm when the guy signed it.”
Tod’s unfinished face. A department store mannequin grinning at the perimeter of the boyswear department by the uncanny red glow of the Exit sign after midnight… that wise-baby face under all that brutally-dyed black hair. Well, it looked unfinished to Victor but Victor thought the same of most white faces, his own included, and if Tod’s appeared a little less finished-looking than most it was because Tod’s was so white. Despite the lunchmeat tan. Tod had thrown a heavy chunk of his considerable fortune at the shadow on the wall called aging; tithing for the Mirror God; with the result that he looked not young but unborn. Speaking of investments. Victor, Tod and Simon were a consortium of friends who’d invested heavily in the fortification and de-snaking of a snake-infested island in the Indian Ocean. As a hedge against apocalypse. Once owned by the writer Paul Bowles.
Simon (portly, bearded, Jewish) shouldered in past the elderly Jesus freak (who merely stood there with that Ask Me About Jesus briefcase, beaming at everyone) waving a paperback edition of that book, yelling something about a lawsuit.
He said
Then a ripping fang of heat (eyelid-erasing light) and the wind and noise of a locomotive dropped on the I.M. Pei addition to the Louvre as they all finally merged before dissipating. First Christian suicide bombing of the etc.
3
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.”
Item: Vic is damned to embody this last passage forever.
Item: Simon senses Vic’s presence whenever Nelke sucks Simon off.
After the success of her first collection, No-No starts her novel.
Hi , don’t mean to be a lurker as such…just don’t feel I have much meaningful or interesting to say. Keep it up though. There’s plenty interesting for me to read here…
[Ed.'s note: Sorry about that, Comrade Karl… I just noticed, for the first time, last night, that I could customize the “LEAVE A REPLY” bit… nothing meant by it! (larf). Have changed it to something less imperative…]
SA! Are you au fait with Adam Curtis? I’m sure you must be.
His latest three part series ” All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” ( just finished ) was pretty good. The sort of provocation that the BBC and ITV didn’t bat much of an eyelid over in the 60′s and 70′s.
Sometimes he’s a bit too obsessed with tying everything together ( i’m happy with a few loose ends at times ) but he hits nails on the head more often than not. The programme this week tied evolutionary biology together with colonial politics to show how Belgium created the Rwandan nightmare. I’m kind of familiar with the arguments but it was good to see something like that on TV as well as being an example of how tying things together works
Otherwise touring duties carry on, I’m listening to my partner laugh her head off at Infinite Jest and I’m wondering why my body has succumbed to attacks of eczema. I’m told it’s not diet-related so I just have to make sure no-one eating outdoors is down-wind from me.
You’ve got all these Twitter/Facebook offers too. worse than eczema.
Comrade DJ Sensei ET! Until a few days ago, I only thought about Adam Curtis roughly twice every five years (I’ve seen two of his films in the past five years). In the past few days I’ve gotten emails from several friends putting your question, in a less elegant form, to me (“Ever hear of Adam Curtis?”). Most of “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” is blocked here (who’d have thought that copyright law would end up being the most effective censorship tool?) but I managed to watch a 59-minute chunk and it seems tighter, less impressionistic, than the other films of his I’d seen. Good stuff, yes. I agree with your complaint about his Unified Field Theory compulsion: that need (to tie it all up in the end) sinks a lot of theoretical frameworks in the “How the Man Behind the Curtain Really Works” community, in my opinion. The inner-logic of Fairy Tales demands that kind of symmetry and closure but Real People are always sloppier, more confused, conflicted and compelled by the random than Goldilocks and her Bears could ever hope to be.
“The programme this week tied evolutionary biology together with colonial politics to show how Belgium created the Rwandan nightmare.” Yeah, I’d like to find that one but no luck yet!
Re: eczema: I always think of The Singing Detective (Michael Gambon version). Have I already mentioned that you shouldn’t eat margarine? It’ll fuck you up.
To everyone who has commented favorably on the story I posted three or four comments above: I thank ye. This is just to add that I fucked up, a bit, in that I had meant to link (inter-textual context!) to another story, in the following sentence, but forgot to:
.
“More than the dedication, it was the last offering in the collection which gave Victor his hairs-on-the-back-of-his-neck moment.”
Steven, I was intrigued enough by Curtis to check out some of his earlier work: The Century of Self, a four-parter which looked at the Freud clan (one of whom is married to Rupert Murdoch’s daughter and is blighting public discourse here in the UK even as we speak) but especially the career of Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, the father of ‘public relations’, who used his uncle’s theories of the subconscious to sell, subvert and persuade. All rather sinister stuff, perhaps all the more so for his (Bernays’) unabashed (read: proud) admissions of same .
Also watched ‘The Trap’, a four-parter that examines the disasters that follow on from reducing people to statistics and detached, ‘predictable’ numbers/factors in equations. I thought it was very good. I’ll burn them and pass them along to you, if you like.
The Century of Self is the best one Curtis has done. Or at least the best one of his i’ve seen. He did one for the Manchester Int. Festival 4 or 5 years ago about the horror of middlebrow America that i didn’t see but which everyone who did raved about. I think he mixes surface inanity with subversive ideas very effectively.
It was part of a theatre installation show and not having to smooth corners for TV probably helped make it stronger.
[ed.'s note: interesting distinction, Comrade ET and I'm fairly eager to see it]
“Extraordinary Claims demand Irrefutable Evidence; how They turned you around was by re-defining your Refutation as a Claim and their Claims as Givens. Take back Logic, empower your Common Sense, re-acquaint yourself with the Plausible, the Probable and the Actual.”
“I will not now info-dump you with family data. We’re happy and Offsprung’s a delightful, self-confident master of her computer (my hand-me-down from 2006): that’s all I need to say. After participating in Facebook, as a sort of experiment, for several years now, I can tell you that the aggressive vapidity of people being amateur PR flacks for their kids’ normative accomplishments is too much for me to bear or inflict upon others. Though there aren’t really a helluva lot of normative programs going on in this household to report on.
“A friend-of-a-facebook friend posted a picture of himself (the last time I saw this man was in 1989) with a new haircut. The man is a salon owner (well-off) who was that sort of flowing-lock’d, hetero-hairdresser-type of Brit when I first saw him. Now he is (in this photo) wizened, asexual, Don-Knotts-esque, etc., plus he’s losing his hair (therefore the buzz cut). Which is fine, because he must be about 60, by now, and we are not immortals. But the point of my digression: because he’s rich and “powerful” (in a salon-owning way) he got about 20 supportive comments for the picture he’d posted. Here are a few (verbatim):
“I think it looks GREAT!!”
“Look at those eyes!!!!!!”
“you look ten years younger!”
“lookin pretty hot there!!!”
“Cue: sound of retching. Ie: what a plopping load of utter bullshit. Or “rubbish”, as the target, himself, would say (if he were being frank). I’m not suggesting that those people should have commented with cruel honesty; I’m just suggesting that a 60-year-old man has no business posting a photo like that and expecting reassurance. Why does he need to post it at all?
“What used to be the occasional little-white-lie of inter-acquaintance diplomacy is now a full time (unpaid) job! The example I provide, above, is the intersection of this reality-subverting pathology and the industrial-level ass-kissing I’ve also noticed on Facebook (minor celebrities who are friends-of-friends tend to get roughly 5-10x the number of comments on their posts, even if their “friends” collection is roughly the same number).
“So, nothing like that out of me. I just don’t want to care about what I look like, at this age (I’m not saying that because I look hideous, because I doubt that I do, quite yet… but I’m sure I look old, because I am old). I still have a reassuring amount of existential angst about smelling bad or dressing like a hobo, of course, so I continue to avoid both. But, Christ, give me a break, I’m a bookish type… when do I get to stop auditioning as an extra in a pop video? If you know what I mean.
“If I were a tekkie I’d start EFFACEBOOK for brainy over-50s with no interest in commenting on rigorously-posed camera-phone photos.
Beloved Wife was at some music-schmooze-function and a rich woman with extensive face-work arrived, looking like a mutant blond bipedal cat in a roaring wind tunnel. And I said: that proves that this “class difference” thing is still just a dream. Fifty years from now, when riches can buy for a 65-year-old woman the ability to really look like a 20-year-old, there will finally be a concrete meaning for “Upper Class” that isn’t just shaded by nuance and folklore. Donald Trump is worth a billion yet he still resorts to an embarrassing combover and that’s real (ie biological) Socialism. He’s only different by degree, not category! Wait until a billion can buy you immortality. That’s when the word “Class” will finally mean something deeply horrible. Mortality is still our Collectivist leveler. I mean, sure, a $50,000 wristwatch is beyond my means, but it’s only mass-hypnosis that has anyone thinking they need one.”
In one of William Gibson’s early books (Neuromancer, I think), one of the protagonists, a female art dealer/curator/historian is commissioned, by an immensely wealthy man, to find the maker of these Cornell-like boxes that seem to offer answers to profound questions.
The zillionaire (Virek?) appears as a hologram/simulacrum and explains to the woman that his corporeal body is a vast and growing mass of cancerous cells residing in a vat in Stockholm. At this point, the woman realises that the very rich are not merely ‘different’ but have become completely alien. Good book. Good trilogy, actually…
SA For once I’m lost for words. He certainly looks better as Myra Breckinridge.
I saw him at Roskilde, a Danish festival where we worked about 8 years ago ( Vague precision there – so typically British ).
He came on and said “Hello Stuttgart!” He was with the Stooges and was absolutely awful. Even on a “so bad it was good” measuring scale.
I seem to remember the Stooges were a sort of breath of fresh air first time round but this was third rate pub rock with a manchild poncing about and not even as good as that sounds.
You’re supposed to be face-melting drunk and sliding sideways against several pairs of muddy aggressive boobs for the show to work, ET. Thought you knew, man.
aha so that’s where I went wrong. A book of Queneau’s sonnets tucked under my left arm whilst my right hand kept my lorgnette perched on my nose was obviously the wrong attire. The mud ruined my Persian slippers too.
Still Iggy wasn’t as bad as Santana were. I’m a big fan of percussion but a 20 minute bongo solo tested my patience to destruction. It started when I joined the line of rock’n'roll lawyers ( Hawaiian shirts, bald pates and ponytails almost to a man ) off-site to get paid and was still dribbling on when I’d got paid and joined the rest of the team to leave the festival site for some PEACE AND QUIET.
Facebook appears to have tapped into an extraordinary need to communicate something/anything that borders on the pathological. I’m not sure I’m entirely immune to this impulse seeing as I’m on here swapping opinions with people I shall most likely never meet or even know the real identity of.
Perhaps you start off aloof on Facebook and end up telling strangers about your every bowel movement. I’ve no desire to join whatsoever though it seems to be a good way of spreading information about what you are up to ( I know many musicians who use it that way ) but it’s hard enough keeping one’s head free for art let alone telling strangers what your tea consisted of.
Well, seeing as I’m sitting here in my… ooops. What was I saying? That’s it: Facebook. My use of it was strictly utilitarian, at first, ET: people I hadn’t seen or spoken with in 20+ years were suddenly easy to locate and contact. It became only slightly sinister when I noticed that some of these same people were lots more likely to post a little note, on my “wall”, than send (or respond to) a private email of the same length… a little bit like Reality TV people who can’t be bothered to do anything that isn’t being filmed (except, of course, voiding their bowels, though I’m sure that’ll change, as you point out). The other sinister aspects became apparent more gradually, one of the worst being C) people you actually know only communicating in the form of Press Releases (and actually trying to sell you things or promote their in-store appearances or those of their kids). Maybe the worst (as I mention above) is the non-stop, zero-sum, circle-jerking assault of values-subverting Orwellian doublespeak about how “gorgeous” or “beautiful” or “awesome” photographs of everyone’s people/pets/things/events are when they aren’t… they’re usually just fucking average. I guess I can’t call it Yuppie Collectivism until the tendency is thoroughly integrated into everyone’s finances, too, but that’s probably on the way with the Bitcoin.
The press release syndrome seems to have affected written communication as well. I’m lucky enough to have friends who don’t feel the need to impersonally tell me what they’ve been up to in 2010 every Xmas in a generic printed off round-robin letter but maybe if I was to track them down on Fackbook ( spelling mistake but I like it! ) it would be a different story.
I wonder whether the urge to say ( or write ) “awesome” at anything is a recognised medical condition? When we last worked in the States in 1999 my partner got quite murderous over the deluge of “Awesome!”s aimed our way. It’s stopped meaning anything and has become like a burp or the sort of thing you inadvertantly utter when you’ve stubbed your toe.
Gearing up for “Infinite Jest”. My partner is on a Foster Wallace binge at the moment. The story about the guy who utters “Victory for the Democratic Forces!” every time he ejaculates is a genuinely laugh out loud piece of work. Aw……errm.
During the Iraq war I went
on a TV strike because the news was
so negative. I put the TV
in the closet and ended
up watching TV
in the closet. So much
for a TV Strike
THIS IS THE BRAVE and INFORMED WOMAN THAT A “SOCIALIST” OF MY VIRTUAL ACQUAINTANCE ONCE REFERRED TO AS A “WHACK-JOB”; WELL, BETTER A “WHACK-JOB” THAN A DUPE OR A WANNABE HACKADEMIC SELL-OUT, COMRADE:
Good stuff…although I had a moment of discomfort when she says that black Americans are ‘…drawing a line in the sand…’ because Obama was bombing Africa. It gave the (entirely unintentional, I know) impression that black Americans are only outraged when fellow blacks are being bombed.
She also seems to be a bit naive, re: African history (she’s surprised and repulsed by the fact that ‘Africans who look like Ghaddafi are fighting Africans who look like me…’
Africa, on the whole, has always been divided on tribal lines (like, albeit often less overtly, most of the world). Many of the conflicts both past and present spring from the colonial powers dividing territories on what they thought was a rational basis (‘OK, here’s a river: that’ll be a good border; here’s a mountain range: good border etc etc’). Usually ended catastrophically because tribal boundaries were very differently delineated.
A very minor point, though.
Who is she? Well, whoever she is, speaking as a connoisseur of ‘whack-jobs’, she exhibits no symptoms. Unlike, say, Obama, who has, in deed, contradicted virtually everything he said when campaigning; or the likes of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Oprah Winfrey and many, many other prominent black Americans [ed.'s note: known as KOCs or "Kapos of Color"] who refused to acknowledge the real issues behind the pitiful, drawn-out agony of poor Michael Jackson.
Instead of standing up and saying (as I believe) Michael Jackson’s entire tragedy, up to and including his death, was the almost inevitable consequence of a sensitive and troubled man trying to reconcile and adapt (physically, if necessary) to a deeply racist society.
Indeed, M, I was a little wincey when she introduced identity politics into that talk but that’s the level that seems to work best with Das Volk (he sniffed)… the lofty abstraction of objective morality doesn’t get much traction in most neighborhoods. Being somewhat of a nut I can work myself into a genuine rage over the killing of kids who look nothing like my own, in a town/country with no familiar landmarks, even when my local economy is “good”… I wish that neurosis of mine were contagious. But, whether McKinney’s indulgence in that was a calculated attempt to motivate or a genuine reflex, she’s brave and decent and informed and rational and there I was feeling rage, again, when some cozy, well-fed Socialist intellectual in D.C. dismissed her, casually, in my Facebook as a whack-job who “gets her news from the National Enquirer”. That’s what Faux Dissent sounds like when it confronts (and is shamed by) the genuine article. As for who McKinney is:
Cynthia Ann McKinney (born March 17, 1955) is a former US Congresswoman and a member of the Green Party since 2007. As a member of the Democratic Party, she served six terms as a member of the United States House of Representatives. In 2008, the Green Party nominated McKinney for President of the United States. She is the first African-American woman to have represented Georgia in the House.[1]
In the 1992 election, McKinney was elected in the newly re-created 11th District,[2] and was re-elected in 1994. When her district was redrawn and renumbered due to the Supreme Court of the United States ruling in Miller v. Johnson,[1][3][4] McKinney was easily elected from the new 4th District in the 1996 election, and was re-elected twice without substantive opposition.
McKinney was defeated by Denise Majette in the 2002 Democratic primary. Some people believe she was defeated because of Republican crossover voting in Georgia’s open primary election, which permits anyone from any party to vote in any party primary and “usually rewards moderate candidates and penalizes those outside the mainstream.”[5] Others believe that her defeat was due to her “her controversial profile, which included support for Arab causes and a suggestion that Bush knew in advance of the September 11 attacks.”[5]
“Equally troubling, investigators learned that several people from around the country made multiple cash deposits in her bank account totaling $100,000 over the past two years, the Times said.”
This might amuse you: my reply to one of the worst ‘ String Up S-K’ offenders on a blog where the sisterhood knew he was guilty 5 fucking minutes after the incident was revealed in the news. One of them is trying desperately to salvage something from the wreckage–now read on:
‘…according to her defence there is still the evidence of the maid’s ripped and torn stockings, for example.’
And of course, @MsChin, they must have been torn by a fat, elderly, sex-crazed
Frenchman on his way to lunch with his daughter… because those hot-blooded continental-types…bof…what would you? Or perhaps there’s another, simpler, Occam’s Razor-type explanation…
Twenty-eight hours after a housekeeper at the Sofitel New York said she was sexually assaulted by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, she spoke by phone to a boyfriend in an immigration jail in Arizona.
Investigators with the Manhattan district attorney’s office learned the call had been recorded and had it translated from a “unique dialect of Fulani,” a language from the woman’s native country, Guinea, according to a well-placed law enforcement official.
When the conversation was translated — a job completed only this Wednesday — investigators were alarmed: “She says words to the effect of, ‘Don’t worry, this guy has a lot of money. I know what I’m doing,’ ” the official said. — The New York Times, today
It’s what used to be called ‘the badger game’. As wiki puts it:
The badger game is an extortion scheme, often perpetrated on married men, in which the victim or “mark” is tricked into a compromising position to make him vulnerable to blackmail.
This con has been around since at least the early 19th century. There are several variations of the con; in the most typical form an attractive woman approaches a man, preferably a lonely, married man of some financial means from out of town, and entices him to a private place with the intent of manoeuvring him into a compromising position, usually involving some sort of sexual act. Afterward an accomplice presents the victim with photographs, video, or similar evidence, and threatens to expose him unless blackmail money is paid.
The woman may also claim that the sexual encounter was non-consensual and threaten the victim with a rape charge. It can also involve such things as the threat of a sexual harassment charge which may endanger the victim’s career.
“Oh, he has form…” was given the Goebbels/Blair/Bush treatment: repeat something often enough and it becomes the ‘truth’. But anyone who actually bothered to try to source this claim quickly discovered that with one exception, it was a case of: ‘…it’s widely known…’ and ‘…many people say…’ and ‘…it’s common knowledge that…’ etc etc ad nauseum; in other words, gossip, rumour, hearsay and innuendo.
I hate the fat bastard’s guts. Imagine how all the people he stepped on in his climb to the top felt? A chance to get the knife in was too good to pass and they became ‘…people…sources…many…’.
The one person who actually came forward claimed that S-K had assaulted her some 10 years previously and that she had met with a lawyer to examine her options. I waited for the lawyer to be named and wheeled-out to confirm her story: no dice. The only corroboration she offered was…wait for it…her mother. A totally unbiased non-witness repeating hearsay (or simply lying–parents have been known to do that for off-spring, you know).
I loathe Strauss-Kahn and would happily see him in prison for the war on the poor that he’s spent years waging. I wouldn’t piss in face if his nostrils were on fire. But just because I detest a man, doesn’t mean abandoning my critical faculties or my distaste for mob-rule and lynchings.
A lot of people, some who post here and many who post at the exciting new Hello!-Grauniad-Unum Newsletter should be ashamed but I doubt they will be. I could emulate the almost-comically creepy BiteTheBum and dredge-up some of the more disgraceful comments but why bother? I expect they’ll come up with the same kind of conspiracy theories in support of the ‘poor, virtuous, working-class black chambermaid’ that they were so quick to scorn when they were deployed to explain S-K’s imbroglio. Of course, he’s a rich, white fat fuck: he must be a rapist.
Fucking bourgeois ‘liberal’ ‘leftists’: they could teach that wanker Pie Face Cameron a thing or two about brass-necked duplicity and hypocrisy. Keep the Red Flag flying, comrades…but not too high or too assertively lest it spook their ‘leader’, ‘Red’ Ed Milliblair. There’s a man after their own shrivelled, shop-worn nod-along-with-Rupert hearts.
Worthy prosecution, M, but you know those types… justice/reason/truth are solely their possessions, by default, and they stick their fingers in their ears and go la la la la forever. An utterly alien concept to them is how you and I can be outraged, on DSK’s behalf, at the injustice done against him… while loathing what we know of the man and what he stands for (though this is interesting); part of it, in this case, is that I don’t enjoy watching the Bluenoses equate a history of “Womanizing” with a propensity to Rape. Coming to conclusions about Right and Wrong (or True/False) based on Like or Dislike is fucking childish and fucking childish they are. If there’s one precious resource we are in a crisis over losing it’s Maturity.
Beyond the matter of my problem with injustice, though, is my refusal to be a Dupe; in light of what I know of the world, in my longish trek across its surface, the whole DSK thing was reading as just too fishy. What’s going to happen now is that it will all be pinned on the maid (funny how her Poor African Saint Card can be flipped to Wiley African Criminal with zero effort). But I’d still like to know how DSK’s right-wing enemies, in France, were Tweeting about it before it went to Press.
PS You have to wonder why the fat rich bastard wasn’t smart enough to film the encounter on his i-phone; or maybe he was and that’s why the phone went missing…?
I actually feel sorry for the woman. The DA’s office is now revealing that she lied about being gang-raped in Guinea when she was applying for asylum. Naturally, a lot of half-wits will jump on this: “See? It’s not the first time she’s falsely cried ‘rape’…”. But that bullshit doesn’t cut any ice with me, any more than the earlier revelation by S-K’s defence team (a few weeks back) that she had dodged paying tax in Guinea. That one made me laugh/spit.
What the fuck does her tax-paying status have to do with anything. Of course, it was just the usual dirty game of trying to discredit a witness. I dislike attempts to railroad people, whether it’s S-K or the woman involved. As for her false rape claim: well, shit, she was applying for asylum and that’s how the game’s played. Being gang-raped is worth X number of points towards a successful application. I don’t see that as any more relevant than her tax-status in Guinea.
What I found depressing/baffling was the number of otherwise reasonably intelligent people who felt that one had to take one side or the other and that in doing so, one revealed one fucking thing or the other about one’s politics or misogyny or feminist credentials or some such horseshit.
They just couldn’t seem to grasp that I (like you and any rational person) was viewing it all as dispassionately as I could, trying to work out what it was really all about, as opposed to what it purported to be all about.
I have an awful feeling that the woman has been played for a mug and is about to get fed into the meat-grinder, having served what I think was her purpose and served it well, as one can see here:
On the streets here, opinion seemed divided about whether the personal details that had emerged since Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s arrest would preclude him from high office, whatever the outcome.
“People are not going to forgive him. At a political level, he is dead,” said Agnès Bergé, 44, who works for a law firm. But Sophie Leseur, 50, an artist, said the saga could turn Mr. Strauss-Kahn into a “martyr.”
“His reputation is tarnished forever,” said Marie Chuinard, 25, a legal adviser. “I think he can come back to French political life, but internationally he is burned.” –NYT, today
‘People’ aren’t going to ‘forgive’ him? ‘Forgive’ him for what, exactly? Fuck it anyway: his reputation is ‘tarnished forever’. Well, exactly. Job done.
PS: One can’t help noting that the two vox pops happy to try, convict and sentence a man on hearsay in the court of tabloid journalism are both in the legal profession. Christ…
“I have an awful feeling that the woman has been played for a mug and is about to get fed into the meat-grinder, having served what I think was her purpose and served it well…”
When will Das Volk grasp that Dirty Tricks are a profession with budgets in the billions and stakes in the trillions? They think of the officially-confirmed conspiracies as flukes; as one-offs by bad apples. Which is the cleverest manipulation of all: to convince the Hoi Polloi that Power is fundamentally benign. In what Universe?
I can imagine an interesting scholarly-historical work called PATSIES. Can you imagine how many thick volumes it would take? To counteract the fairytale of History as a randomly-directed, organic crystal and re-direct all our suspicions towards the powerful, self-interested actors that have been fighting over the steering wheel since before the fucking Aztecs.
“‘People’ aren’t going to ‘forgive’ him? ‘Forgive’ him for what, exactly?”
Nauseating, no? It’s like trying to teach the metric system to a goldfish. Fucking Bernays, right? It’s why we’re in the mess we’re in: Das Volk aren’t rational. They are far too easy to manipulate. It’s not even the injustice that outrages me, in the end… it’s the credulity. Everything we “know” about The State is taught to us, from a young age, by… The State. Neat little arrangement.
I’ve fallen for one or two manipulations myself, of course (eg I was actually inspired by Assange for a nano second… until I began asking myself: if he’s such a danger, why is he A) world-famous B) alive?) … but I always righted myself the moment I had access to enough info. The main problem with Das Volk being that the lazy, selfish fucking bastards never seek out information or do more than sneer at it when it’s more than (or contradicts) what they (think) they already know. They accept the swill they are fed and wallow in their lot and wiggle their rumps when the farmer comes around, every hour, to chose candidates for the abattoir.
A personal story. A few days after Obama’s poll-boosting Osama-skit, I was walking with a friend. I made a casual joke about the corpseless “assassination” of the anti-Santa. Said friend reacted with mild bafflement: what was I implying? Said friend had fallen for it “hook, line and sinker” as they say.
Needless to say I was disgusted… not so much at his credulity (not two sentences in that narrative add up; the story is bizarre; if a civilian murder trial were based on the evidence presented, the prosecution would be laughed out of court) but the fact that when I pressed him to explain why he believed in the narrative, he only kept repeating (with repeated shrugs): “Because I do.”
“I dunno. I just do.”
This from an otherwise educated and intelligent man. He hadn’t done a bit of reading (serious or otherwise) on the matter; not a bit. He’d scanned a few headlines and listened to a few pundits. And that was all he needed to form an opinion it was imfuckingpossible to budge him from.
But then, I can remember arguing with someone else, fairly heatedly, about the Gulf of Tonkin event… until, about fifteen minutes into it, this person revealed that, until I’d mentioned it, he’d never actually heard of it. In other words, I was arguing with The State by Proxy. Which is futile.
Apropos of nothing really, except that the ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ is almost certainly an express locomotive…have you ever read Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner? I read it in my early 20s on the recommendation of an older friend, a jazz drummer who was teaching at the Berklee College of Music when I met him. He was the first black American whom I knew intimately well, despite his being about 15 years older than me and he was one of my closest friends for almost 10 years (until he he was killed in a car accident in Vermont).
He was a lovely man who taught me an enormous amount, especially about music. He also introduced me to Mencken, John Cage, Sun Ra, Lord Buckley, Lenny Bruce, Bob and Ray, John Berryman, cribbage, E.B. White, Sara Vaughan, The Last Poets, Julie London, Chester Himes, Jelly Roll Morton…and a lot more besides.
He was, in addition, a smash with women. A tall, strikingly handsome man, with a killer smile and a deep baritone voice, the body of an Olympic swimmer, a vast fund of knowledge about a hugely broad array of subjects (like all genuinely interesting people, he was endlessly interested himself) that he discussed wittily at the drop of a hint. He was generous in every way that it’s possible to be generous. I modelled myself on him shamelessly and it was deeply flattering and encouraging that he saw something worthwhile in me.
I cried like a baby when he was killed. I think I was more broken-up about it than his girlfriend, a drop-dead beautiful jazz-dancer. Then again, I’d known him longer. I could never repay the debt I owed him, the debt a pupil owes a great teacher, although in gratitude, I tried (and am still trying) to be a better man than my nature inclines me to. He could quote great chunks of Thoreau’s Walden from memory and although he couldn’t resist poking fun at some of Thoreau’s conceits, he felt a deep personal connection with and a great and abiding affection for Thoreau. It’s one of the many things he passed on to me.
Jesus…I don’t know why I’m telling you all this; the thought of Stand On Zanzibar, a book Brian found horrifyingly plausible, breached the memory dam…sorry.
[ed.'s note: What a luvly (and resonant, but in an unexpected way: more on that later) comment, M! In a few hours I'll have enough time (if Offsprung gets to bed at a merciful hour) to do it justice with a real response...]
I’ve been rare around here, abducted by meatspace. As the chief composer/arranger/ tactician and videographer of Beloved-Wife’s New Musical Project, I just don’t have the time to water this Virtual Plant called TET. The Band is going fantastically-well (last night was the Official Premier: went swimmingly); the work is hard but the bumps are few and operating a quasi-classical, Brechtian, cabaret-style act in the darkest capital of Europe, as a family business, is a life-long dream of mine so fanciful that I never dared admit it to myself… until it began to happen (the only dream I’ve ever had that was more fanciful was called “Living in a Lighthouse”). Even Offsprung can sing a refrain or two from the songbook…
Well, this twee fantasy only took roughly 35 years (counting from the first All-Night Fellini Festival I ever caught in an Art-house Repertory Cinema on the East Coast in long-lost 1977) to happen…
Until the band is fully-functional without me (and the royalty checks are rolling in) I am the custodial ghost of TET. Here’s a ranty compilation of opinions, pertaining to texts, as a memento…
i’m gonna start at the Very Beginning & methodically work my way though TET steve-o
& no longer be just a fookin lurker
even though i fookin lurv* fookin lurkin
*annie hall allusion of course
[ed.'s note: Oh Gut Gawd, Memester! Work your way through? Sure way to give yourself a headache. Dip-and-skip-and-rifle (almanac-style) is the safest approach. Try the Virgilian Lots method: close your eyes, scroll down, put your finger on the screen and read... there]
Perhaps the goal has been to render the populace so diabolically retarded that when the Martial Law/ Internment Camps kick in, the move will be met with a sigh of relief; if so: it worked. Bring the big boot down! Chain these bunny-tards up!
We will print out this internet link, read three lines of it and then attach a tap to the bottom right hand corner of the bottom paragraph. The tap will have a spigot attached to it which when turned in an anti-clockwise direction will drain off the industrial levels of winsomeness that have been allowed to accumulate in the paragraphs above the bottom paragraph. This will take some time to do and may require the tap to be removed occasionally and replaced with a stopper, in order to wash out particularly stubborn cliches that stick to the inside and clog up the pipe. The stopper is necessary because once those winsome phrases start their downwards slide there is not much that will stop them sliding. Once successfully rinsed out the tap will be replaced and the draining away process will continue.
Once the text has been thoroughly cleaned we will read it again and discover that apart from words like “the” or “and” there is virtually nothing there. We will turn on all the lights in the room so that when we screw the print-out up into a ball and throw it in the direction of the wastepaper bin we can be assured that it actually enters the bin. If it takes three goes we will ensure that this piece of prose gets put where it deserves to be and once it’s there it will be taken out of the house ASAP. Or sooner.
ET! I see that you, too, were deeply moved by the profound, uh… vacuity? Vapidity? Is there a word in that general category that will neatly include shadings of the righteous revulsion towards 20-somethings luxuriating in the delusion that they’re privileged enough to be that empty-headed and get away with it? Yeah.
Please note that your pastiche fails by being the obvious work of a literate creature! Sorry, man! As a slapworthy airhead you suck.
It’s all very well being able to whip your daily routine into an impressionistic bit of prose but if you can’t realise that in doing so you are but 2cm away from being copy for a lifestyle ad then it’s all a bit waste of space isn’t it? .
It’s difficult of course – I’d imagine an ad exec could use Henry Darger to sell something if they wanted ( “Glandelinian by Dior – brings out the Vivian Girl in you” ) so it needs extra care when you’re putting something together which that irksome piece so totally lacks dude.
[ed.'s note: I deleted a minor comment of mine from an older part of the comment chain, which maneuver then pitched a comment of Comrade ET's forward, three months, into an utterly achronological spot... so I'm sticking it here, preferring a non-sequitur to the more odious choice of losing ET's thought, on the matter he was addressing, altogether...]
For me it’s the inability of people to consider the opposite or at least different point of view that is disappointing [said ET, last July]. It may end up confirming what you originally thought but it’s always worth doing in my experience. Obviously I don’t need to read the likes of Stalin, Pol Pot or Hitler to form opinions about them.
I think that’s what I like/love about art. Not that it reflects my own life back to me which appears to be the rationale for many people but that it allows me to enter worlds I have no experience of.
My own work isn’t political with a big P but I hope it provides a worthwhile distraction/diversion to the consumer la la land that we present the work in.
Well, that hits the bent nail on its head, doesn’t, ET? “lifestyle ad”. This is just a slice from the Consumer Continuum… buying and selling and buying-back what you’ve sold and being sold to others (with “others” to include oneself)… that’s the totality of the mindset here. The culture loop these kids are trapped in is a beast with a pipe from its mouth to its anus. Which is not to say the beast isn’t, somehow, shrinking. It stands and staggers on trembling legs and you can see its ribcage and its coat is dull and patch-bald. That’s the tragic experiment: what happens when Materialism is all they ever knew… when their Lives have been experienced/performed as Commercials and that defines the aesthetic of every Art that should have *saved* them from the shallow trap of Materialism… and then the Great Depression 2.0 sets in? And the Material is just a memory? Since they’ve managed to fuck up their Art, I guess their only recourse will be Fundamentalist Religion (that’s probably a redundant phrase). We’ll see in a few years.
To quote from the ad copy/”story” we’re lambasting here (italics applied thanks to this stupid template, which won’t block-quote without them):
After dinner we will drive around listening to emotional guitar music from the mid-90s and you will rest your head on my shoulder and I will pet your hair and think about crying and you will look at the speedometer and think about your childhood. In a 24-hour grocery store at 2:30 a.m. we will walk through the produce section and it will be very bright and I will say that I feel insane and drunk and you will pick up a muffin and ask me how many calories I think it is and I will say 860 and you will say 1120 and I will slap it out of your hand and while you are distracted I will kiss your mouth and then step back and look at your face. You will ask what I see and I will say your name and grin and hold your hand and we will walk through each aisle of the grocery store without talking. In the parking lot you will let go of my hand and run to the car and stare at me as I walk toward you with a neutral facial expression.
Just crying out for handheld camera, jumpcuts, washed-out colors plus the same echoing-chimey guitar track they’ve used on every “indie”-youth targeted ad since the mid-9os!
A few years ago I had the thought that, considering all the people I’ve known, very well or not very well at all, one of them must have been, statistically speaking, without anyone (living) knowing it, a murderer. How would I know? How well do we know the people we know? The careful type, of above-average intelligence, could get away with it.
Then I thought of “avant garde” Lit; how obvious the stuff usually is… it’s red-flagged with typographic gimmicks, disjunctive syntax, silly characters and/or situations, etc. Surely there are subtler ways to smuggle the aesthetically uncanny onto the page…?
Yes, that’s right–someone is out there sabotaging our effort to bring good literature to the people. The literary squatter has copied our covers but inside is a screed against Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Russo and his story. Also within the covers of the ersatz 1C1S is the saboteur’s own story, an unreadable run-on paragraph that is a chapter of an unpublished and, evidently, unpublishable novel.
Well, we at the BBF believe that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but this is not the sort of compliment we want, as some of you who have picked up this silly forgery have been upset to find something other than “The Whore’s Child.” So, our apologies for the inconvenience. If you are looking for the real thing, they are still available at our various outlets, or here as a download.
And, if you want to take any of the imposter’s stories out of circulation, that’s fine by us. Heck, maybe they’ll be collector’s items when this so-called author wins the Pulitzer someday. Or . . . maybe not.
In a discussion about art/music/people’s brains on the TV last night Brian Eno said that recent research shows that people’s brains are getting smaller.
I’ve met him a couple of times ( distant family connections via a marriage ) and he’s an extremely interesting man to talk to but I couldn’t help feeling that what he was saying in that interview rather confirmed the brainclaim.
He’s busy working with apps and naturally they are the way forward. Well they may well be but the way forward to what exactly? My other half says ( quite accurately I think ) that apps are like those wind-up tin toys you get in the Hawkins catalogue ( Hawkins being a UK-specific mail order firm ) – colourful, fun but essentially toys/gimmicks.
What disturbs me is how co-optable these things are through being SO connected to a particular corporation. Rather like flash-mobs which were mildly interesting when they started but then became an advertising trick seemingly without those involved even realising they were being exploited for little or no money.
Yes, I’ve read the claim that cranial capacity has been shrinking over the last 5,000 [erratum: 30,000] years, ET, but what they can’t tell from that is whether or not brains have become more efficient (or have shifted vital computational resources from the job of, say, smelling predators to the job of abstract thinking)… though I hate to think that some of the blazingly dim comments I’ve read, online, since the late-1990s, were written by people actually smarter than our ancestors. For that would make our ancestors chim… oh, wait.
The whole pop “Evolution” and “Genome” fad is just Quasi-Enlightened cover for Eugenics, though, IMO. When they started making these “discoveries” about Neanderthal/ Homo Sapiens gene-sharing, recently, I knew it was only a matter of time before various neo-Nazty forums/commenters used it for racial flamewar ammo. The Grail, of course, is being able to prove that Euros and Afros diverge on the level of species…
Re: Eno: liked his stuff from the ’70s… the Roxy and solo albums (owned most of them, as much for their covers as their tunes)… but Brian, I think (no offense meant to your distant kin, ET) is a Moneygrubbing Whore-Geek who bigs-up these ridiculous-fucking apps because A) he’s got some kind of sponsorship gig or B) he wants to seem young and really with-it, man… no fogey our Brian! Hey, Bri, maybe some platinum-selling rapper will get you to Executive-Produce, just like U2, 20 years ago…!
In the real world, having to take crash-courses in New Technology every 6-weeks for some trivial advantage like being able to make 3-D films with your phone, or speak with the Dead, or whatever, is as big a time-waster as blow (in its use as well as time spent wanting more) but at least blow doesn’t require a manual or updates. Fuck me, last time I checked, the best that most of us could hope for was c. 90 years to eat, drink, fuck, sleep, wash the dishes and change the world… who has so much extra time to waste on these proliferating apps? Wake me up for the Time Traveling app but, until then, I’m happy with my ’90s Tech (cell phone, PC, email and free porn). I have not and will not even bother with Twitter!
No offence taken SA. Whenever I’ve spoken to him I’ve always wished I liked his stuff more. We work with a sound artist who, commercially speaking hasn’t a clue and who doesn’t appear to want to have a clue either. The fact that he’s showing “I married a Foley Footstep” in an obscure venue at 1.00 this Friday lunchtime and after doing remixes for the likes of Sonic Youth and Pulp turned his back on that should give you a clue as to his talent for survival in the art world.
In comparison Brian’s experimental work seems so controlled and calculated.
re; Twitter yes exactly although a bunch of foul-mouthed tweets might be entertaining!
(It’s fitting we’re chatting about this on the day that The Steve Jobs Death App kicked in)
Eno belongs to a special category of techno-cheerleading-sellout that tends to pull enormous corporate support (as some think of U2, who, they forget, are a corporation) while appearing, to the untrained eye, to remain “funky” and outsidey and “hip”; the monk on the kind of mountaintop that comes with its own heli-pad and a standing invitation to TED TALKS.
Somehow I got my name on the mailing list of a next-generation version of Eno… DJ Spooky. The last thing DJ Spooky tried to sell me (in my baffled In-Box) was a book he was promoting at an event the address of which was 7 World Trade Center. The book has something to do with Climate Change (and a trip Spooky took to Antarctica, sponsored by whom? Al Gore?): so, to recap, Spooky is savvy enough to combine Climate Change and Ground Zero… a combination that no Normative Liberal with a good job and between 25-45 years of age, surely, could pass up. Cha-ching.
Spooky’s products (computer-music/ public pseuds-natter/ coffee table books) are Mediocrity Itself but his “message” (that we can fix things by buying things and by generally opting into the technological shit-circus of Empire) keeps him in well-made shoes. I’m sure Eno’s footwear is similar.
PS Re: “Twitter yes exactly although a bunch of foul-mouthed tweets might be entertaining!” yeah but after how long would the bloom fade on the act of tweeting the word “cunt” in combo with various adjectives and one of several imperatives? Not long, I’d think
[ed.'s note: Holy Fecking Sheet I've just noticed I started this thread... edition 8.0 of TET... in Oct of 2010 and it is very nearly a year later! We've slowed the metabolism down to a very magisterial Geologic Scale... ahhhhhh, nice... ]
Ironic that all these people HAVE to go to the South Pole in order to tell us to conserve energy.
Don’t they have an app that allows you to pretend you’re in a country?
[ed.'s note: no hipsta on Earth can pass up the fucking chance to go to the fucking Antarctic, ET, simply because it's one of two terrestrial landmasses that very few hipstas have i-padded in a coffee shop on... the other being Gary, Indiana]
An evening of compositions performed by a “virtual string quartet” of Paul D. Miller’s compositions for iPhone/iPad and string ensemble. Special guests to appear on the evening as well.
9 PM: Presentation & Performances by Paul Miller
10 PM – Midnight: Music, Food & Open Bar generously provided by ‘wichcraft, Belvedere Vodka, HobNob Wines and Moet Chandon
$75 per person
(“Paul D. Miller” is DJ Spooky’s personym)
or
NEW DJ SPOOKY
iPHONE APP
Play a smooth mix of custom tracks from DJ Spooky’s The Secret Song album with one touch, or get creative and play your own remix of the tracks using the built-in DJ music mixer, DJ Spooky sound effects, and scratches!
I “like” that exclamation mark… it’s so old fashioned
the first item on Spooky’s site is:
Hello People!
This is just a brief reminder, my string ensemble concert is tomorrow. It’s a special event, and yes, there’s an open bar with Moet, and yes there’s catering by one of the top chef’s in NY, and even more, you get to see one of the first Ipad based concerts in NY. I’ll be sampling a live string ensemble playing my compositions. And yes, open bar of Moet isn’t so bad, eh!?
If you have a moment, check out this video of my concert last week at The Tate Modern. It was their 10th Anniversary, and they had me and Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth headline the event. He’s an old friend who played guitar on my album project The Secret Song. It’s 2 minutes long! Check it out! http://www.vimeo.com/11810611
All details for the concert are below
And last but not least – don’t forget to check out the new single with Public Enemy about Arizona – it’s a blast from the past, and a booma from the future.
in peace,
Paul aka DJ Spooky
Along with the shameless materialism (Moet!) and the cultural-shrunken-head-necklace he proudly wears and gyrates in (Tate Modern, Sonic Youth, Public Enemy) notice that Spooky connects with Zeitgeisty political power-points (Ground Zero, as I mentioned before, and, now, Arizona… which could be about immigration, the Tucson assassinations or the wild fires).
I’m just trying to find my upchuck app. Hobnob wines and Belvedere vodka will be two of the many liquids passing through my lips on their way to the floor
I’m actually conceptualizing a “Give DJ Spooky Menstrual Cramps” app at this very moment, ET! Check my TETSHOP for downloading! .005 cents of every download goes to a fund I’ve started to paper every square centimeter of some lucky Third World country with my likeness!
Nice one Steven. The haterz out there just don’t get the vibe you’re on.
btw if you need a filmcrew crew to document the papering then check me out. My CV is mash up app-style! Imagine Prodigy in Costa Rica filmed by Reuben Mamoulian starring Bud Abbott and Hannah Montana with art direction by Titian and you’re half way there!
“Stunning” -Village Voice, “There’s there there alright!” -Gertrude Stein.
And here’s DJ Spooky going after that recent Liberal Sacred Cow and cultural phenom “Precious”… ooops… I mean…. the dangerously powerful Dick Cheney… ooops… I mean, the career-threateningly controversial subject of 9/11… ooops…. I mean… here’s DJ Spooky “attacking” the almost-comically-safe target of…
Lamplighter: I left
the bronzing brick and
sheets of steel that cut the streets
that glittered mornings left
cold night sweat in sheets, and cut
the streets with light I left you
somewhere inbetween
the lamplight left me
to imagine you
Lamplighter: I left you
pressed to drawn shades
thin sheets that pressed your sleep
into your chest, lit. Light
something, if there is something left
to be lit.
a machine made from summer when
there was wind in the wheat
when the seeds of the wheat
put their backs into it
(may the wind be always at
that there)
and wandered in
out of the
wandered in and out of
your hair caught in gloating
convoy of toads
like the moment the Spanish armada awoke
to spanish pears palms weighted with
pears when they lost to the sea
the wheat in the wind
wheat will not grow near the sea
pears will not grow in spain.
Found it difficult to watch this until I went to take my sunglasses off and realised my black polo-neck was rolled up over my eyes. Totally not from the fridge.
Until the tendons on my wrist played up I was a keen pandeiro player ( the Brazilian adaptation of the tambourine .- I could bore you further ), It’s the instrument that this music was made to accompany. You can get all the beats and use of fingertips, thumb and heel of the hand in the right places but the feel really is the elusive thing here.
We worked in Rio many years ago and there you see 10 year olds who can play the pandeiro with the right swing to it. I may have the technique but I sound like Black Sabbath’s drummer in comparison.
Still it’s a lovely thing to play and if I could find a 50′s style doo-wop group I’d offer to accompany them. It would sound perfect.
Sadly my playing isn’t what it was SA. Carpal tunnel syndrome put paid to my ambitions so although I still enjoy playing it doesn’t have the snap it did and a video would be more provocative performance art rather than sinuous groove.
with his wire-frame glasses, lack of hair and slight podge he could be me!
not sure about the choon but the intro is a pretty good example of the Brazilian lap-top ( as they call the pandeiro ) in action. Most Bossa Nova takes it’s languid rhythm from the instrument.
The triplet is done with fingertip, ball of the thumb and the fleshy pad of the little finger. The technique is like a fish thrashing about on the bottom of a boat.
The bit where the audience suddenly break into applause is extremely hard to do. The left hand does all the work but the fingertip beats with the right hit the drum as it goes up and down.
The friction bits like a snare drum roll are reasonably easy to do with the fingers but the friction bit with the heel of the hand is very difficult to do. He might wax the skin to get extra friction but I don’t know of any other player who does that.
well, now, I’ve got a non-sequitur for you, Comrade ET (you, being an Ahtist, may appreciate this); I was Googling one of my favorite Ahtists (Kara Walker) and came up with this brilliant image:
… which is accompanied by this unfortunate bout of Artspeak mumbo jumbo:
“Pastoral is a large painted black silhouette on a white ground whose crisp and complex outline brings to mind delicate paper cutouts, but whose image evokes something more sinister and perhaps more humorous. A seated negroid woman, holding a sickle, is mounted by the carcass of a colossal sheep. The sheep’s head and her profile together make a grotesque face. The power relations between the two are ambiguous. While the sheep is clearly on top, his legs are off the ground and he defecates either in fear or out of sheer disrespect. The sheep, popularly incapable of individual decision, appears quite assertive. It is not clear whether the woman is empowered or oppressed by the animal on her back. Walker’s work is controversial in that it examines the rather uncomfortable, sexually-charged relationships between masters and slaves. Just as the image is ambivalent, so too is the means used in creating it. Convex and concave black and white shapes vie for the roles of ground and figure, neither conveying volume more successfully than the other. The traditionally white sheep and conventionally black slave are rendered equal by their colorless tone.”
- text by Paul Edmunds from the exhibition ‘One Night Stand’ at Joao Ferreira Fine Art, Capetown, South Africa
Which is just so patently wrong. The piece is obviously about Hair (and race)!
I must confess I’m not getting master and slave, I’m not getting the pushmepullyou of black and white shapes ( it’s black on a white background all the way for me ) but my immediate reference was Lotte Reiniger’s films of shadow-puppet fairy tale plays which has made the man-faced sheep difficult to dislodge in my mind when I look at it.
What a good artist though – to my shame I’d never heard of her before.
Edmunds’ “analysis” is doubly-irritating for being as “obvious” as it is wrong… “The traditionally white sheep and conventionally black slave are rendered equal by their colorless tone”… gak. Apparently, anybody is qualified to write this stuff.
What’s sickening is the number of times I’ve left complimentary comments on YouTubes of Walker’s Art, only to have PC-Retards (both Black and White) attack the compliments because they (the attackers) are too childish/ thick/ immune to real Art to “permit” anything weightier than “uplifting” pablum and lullabies…
I meant to carry this on a bit further but the server went down last night and we were forced to make our own entertainment.
I would have thought the fact that Walker uses silhouette is highly significant. it’s hardly touched on in the piece above which instead regurgitates a few pet fave themes of the writer.
Is Walker also making a feminist statement by using an art-form seen as feminine, very minor and incapable of holding weighty themes?
By using a form that has connotations of parlour games is she evoking an 18th century drawing room where racism was perhaps more overt than it is now?
It also appears to be a bit of an assault on the psychoanalysts that use Rorschach ink-blots as an indicator.
Oh, [he exclaimed, puffing his pipe] she’s plugging directly into, and confronting, and tinkering with, the living energy of Plantation-era America, which has not faded in force but grows as America grows (as a population and a womb of global populist trends); the Antebellum Pantheon of archetypes is all there. To go back to the sheep (with its wool) and its awful weight on that beautiful (she is fetching in silhouette) woman’s back, bringing the suffering of its weight and the shame of its animal associations (and shitting!): “kinky” hair is no small thing in America (or even in the “Western” world and beyond) but a powerful symbol and divider. 85% of all Black women you will ever see in American movies/ TV and in Wallmarts and BMW dealerships and McDonalds and the White House have taken the time and expense to straighten their hair… it’s more than an ephemeral fashion choice. It’s almost like seeing people with Germanic accents wandering around NY, in the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, with numbers tattooed on their wrists: if you’d only seen (or heard of) one you’d think nothing of it. Or supposing all the citizens of Tokyo got that surgery to make their epicanthic specialness go away…? We’d probably notice and comment.
The beauty of mining such a cleanly powerful (and simple) visual strategy is that so much can be projected on it; so many layers of metaphor. The Rorschach is there, the reference to “minor” “feminine” arts (on a par with playing the Spinet), the quality of cinema and old still photography both…
It’s just too bad people (Americans especially) no longer generally understand/appreciate what Art is and think of it, now, as merely therapeutic, or entertaining, or decorative self-expression… which anyone with enough time on his/her hands, and the “right attitude”, can do. Which is why so much shitty crafts-fair mediocrity gets Facebook “likes” while challengingly adult work like Kara Walker’s is under relentless attack, Comrade ET!
God knows I like a spot of entertainment myself but the idea that art is an experience as much as anything else does seem to be disappearing.
Last week I went to see a retrospective of Magritte. He’s a terrible painter, most of the paintings in the last 20 years of his life are really awful yet there are some paintings that completely capture the oddness of dreams. The huge apple in the room is little more than an illustration yet the idea works – the apple has a presence that you can almost hear.
We spent the afternoon wondering why his stuff works – he gives you enough reasons as to why it wouldn’t work. The fact that he wasn’t consistent makes the mystery even richer if anything.
[ed.'s note: agreed, Comrade ET. On a technical level Magritte was just a step over Rousseau... so his naive vision, like Henri's, remained unmolested by sophisticated theories and techniques and pure as a boyscout's hobby. You can see right through the paint into the man's Tin Tin (sic)-reading nightmind. I'd posit a troika of Rousseau-Magritte-de Chirico... the Surrealists I'd most expect to have model trains running in their basements!]
This comment appears to anticipate the one I’m replying to ( the Reply button clearly influenced by Surrealist parlour games ). No model-trains in my basement but I grew up with Tintin so add me to the list and chuck it on the pile.
Many Tintinophiles are claiming Spielberg has ruined their childhoods with the release of his latest film. Clearly they never saw the Herge sanctioned live action films of the 60′s. Absolutely dreadful.
Spielberg’s film just looks creepy and an attempt to make an Indiana Jones film by any other means. The live action Tintin films feature a man-child with an unruly quiff with Paul McCarthy’s sea captain in tow and a dog that is difficult to keep in the frame. They are the stuff of nightmares.
[ed.'s note to ed: A) indeed, what *is* up with that 'Reply' button? B) Paul McCarthy sea captain? Does he have genitalia on his salty face? C) I've seen a production still of the Spielberg thing to which you refer and I second the "creepy"; never a Tintin fan myself (as you can probably guess from my misspelling of his name in a post preceding this) so I don't care, really. Except to say that it's been 20+ years since I could watch anything by Spielberg and not think of the US Military. Don't know why. Oh, wait, yeah: I do know why.]
You don’t want to look too closely at the Captain’s face in case there is a genital or two protruding out of the beard.
I’ve no desire to see the Spielberg film either but was amused by the “my childhood is ruined” over-reactions. There’s a ton of rubbish to wade through before you even get to the current version.
Tintin was what made me want to draw stories in the first place so has a particular place in my development. I haven’t read them in over 30 years but they are brilliantly told stories with dodgy foreigners and racism mixed in with surprising displays of support for gypsies, native North and South Americans, the Chinese as well as antagonism towards imperial powers.
PC FOLLIES of the ANTEBELLUM or RETARDATION is COLOR-BLIND
Someone with the unimprovably self-satirizing name of LaToyahas posted a moronic “article” and, being that the comment I posted, in response, is subject to moderation, I’ll post the “article” here, along with my comment, as insurance that my comment sees the light of day:
Woman is not the nigger of the world.
John Lennon is not the final authority on whether it’s ok to use the term nigger.
Quoting black men from the 60s is not a valid defense against critiques from black women, black feminists, and our allies today.
The term nigger is not “in the past.”
The term nigger has not, and has never been, a term that can be equally applied to everyone.
Arguing that black people don’t have a monopoly on the term nigger is just fucking disgusting. You want it that bad? Really?
Over on Facebook, the woman posing with the infamous Slutwalk NYC photo (and the woman who created the sign) defended themselves. The tl; dr version of their statements: “It was wrong to use the word nigger, but the song is true!”
to which I replied:
Damn. This bourgeois over-reaction to Lennon’s (excellent) song just goes to show how degraded the black intelligentsia has become by corny, PC, hand-me-down sensibilities. “Radicals”? Don’t make me laugh. How can you encourage Radical or Dissident thought/speech/action when you’re censoring Art with the zealous stupidity of uptight, blue-white matrons from suburban Ohio, c. 1964?
I won’t even *go* into the internalized plantation of the mindset which thinks that only blacks can use the word “nigger”, or dictate its application (and, um, hey, if a dude is half-black, is it half-wrong for him to use the “n-word”?) This exasperating bullsh*t reminds me of the inevitable black hissy fits (the genius) Kara Walker provokes… talk about arrested development! No wonder (the hideous, slap-worthy) Tyler Perry is a billionaire. Have some more poison on that poo, Boo…?
Hell yeah, the USA is the most race-saturated hyper-propaganda field in the “developed” world and every single one of my progressive white American friends is racist on a level they can’t comprehend (owing chiefly to a lack of trying)… but how is THIS helping to combat that? Picking the softest targets, for the easiest reasons, and being *wrong*, on top of it… that doesn’t help at *all*.
Act like Intellectuals and stop privileging your “feelings” and re-learn to *think*… it was the “White Man” who put it into your heads that Negroes are More Emotional/Less Cerebral; why do you honor that socio-psycho-toxin by confirming it? Of course, the Friendly Racism of the white “progressive” encourages this false dichotomy (white brains/ black hearts) because it *flatters* them (which is why they can indulge in all that self-deprecating humor about Things White People Like… because YOU are still beneath them). Learn to be Above Things, Negroes. Stop this eternal, self-degrading appeal to the paternalistic white framework of trivial PC “justice”: it’s a rigged game. It’s costing you Precious (no pun intended) IQ points.
A word is a word is a word, Sanctimonitards, and context is everything. Now boycott Kanye (and every “black” entertainer out there) for using the “hurtful” words “bitch” and “ho”, which both, as you know, “belong to women” (@Kanye: make all royalty checks payable to… Yoko Ono).
Goddamn… it really is 1957 all over again! I blame that Halfrican in the WH (just kidding).
PS and, yes, I’m a Nigger. But I’d be happier being a Nigger if you corny, crypto-middle-class Cry Babies joined another group (I heard the Mormons are looking for converts). Please defect, thumb-suckers, and restore some grandeur and dignity to the word “Nigger”.
Harpal Brar (at 35:00) is one of the most methodically lucid articulators/ aggregators of The Pertinent News (and its fundamental meaning) as I’ve seen/read/heard in a very, very long time
Considering the Tsunami of Lies that we call “Mainstream Media”, isn’t it nice to think that with just a little effort, we can get an idea of what’s really going on Out There, and that there is a “Watchdog Press” (it just doesn’t come wearing a suit and a tie and a sociopath’s blinding smile)…?
to quote the video channel:
Dan Glazebrook (independent analyst), Lizzie Phelan (journalist), and Harpal Brar (politician and writer) provide much-needed analysis, counterpropaganda and polemic on ‘Libya, Africa and Imperialism’ in a public meeting convened by Oxford’s Stop the War Coalition. Phelan and Brar recently returned from Libya and provide substantial firsthand insight.
“Nothing is but what is not.” This simple sentence made a powerful impact on me as a school boy, just as “Knowledge becomes power only when it’s withheld” would have made an impression if anyone had actually said it! (larf) The World isn’t a puzzle, but the Human Mind sees to that; riddles, secrets, intrigues, deceptions, dissemblings, obfuscations and codes are what we do best (along with unraveling same). Just ask Nabokov or Arthur Scherbius. Maybe it starts with the elemental acrostic of DNA? It certainly explains our love lives, economic system and politics. In any case… look at this man’s beautiful work:
A GLIMPSE INTO THE CRINGE-INDUCING ABYSS of one of JAMES WOOD’S BIGGEST ARSE-LICKERS
Have a look at the video below. You expect Nige to break down about half-way through it. To tell us where the bodies are buried.
It’s bad enough that Nige chose “passion” as a topic (a cliche second only to —what?— in the public speaking game). But what kind of dim-bulb narcissist gives a 15-minute talk on the subject by dutifully reciting from an unremarkable list of events from his own unremarkable life? By the time Nigel gets to the misty-eyed remembrance of his passion for collecting memoirs of Canadian Prime Ministers (I’m not making this up), it’s obvious that something is going terribly wrong: the sound man has missed his cue! Or is the canned-laughter machine malfunctioning…?
Nigel sent me this link in a group-mail. You’d think he’d want to bury the video. If it were funnier (ie: if the pace weren’t so slow) it would surely go viral.
It’s always the ambitious idiots (Duh-Ed Champion lunges to mind) who drop “passion” into the Literary Conversation (with a mace-shaped, corn-studded plop), because “passion”, unlike talent, or hard-won ability, or taste, or intelligence… is anybody’s, at any time, to have. No luck or hard work or brutally frank self-knowledge required. And aren’t “ambition” and “passion” nearly synonymous in these cases? And I don’t mean the ambition to improve; to become closer readers or better writers or more interesting speakers.
If only Nigel had been imaginative enough to start his “talk” with the etymology of “passion”.
late 12c., “sufferings of Christ on the Cross,” from O.Fr. passion, from L.L. passionem (nom. passio) “suffering, enduring,” from stem of L. pati “to suffer, endure,” from PIE base *pei- “to hurt” (cf. Skt. pijati “reviles, scorns,” Gk. pema “suffering, misery, woe,” O.E. feond “enemy, devil,” Goth. faian “to blame”). Sense extended to sufferings of martyrs, and suffering generally, by early 13c.; meaning “strong emotion, desire” is attested from late 14c., from L.L. use of passio to render Gk. pathos. Replaced O.E. þolung (used in glosses to render L. passio), lit. “suffering,” from þolian (v.) “to endure.”
There’s something unexpectedly telling there.
PS: ["In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like
experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine
to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organizedevents are branded TEDx, where x = independently
organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for
the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.*
(*Subject to certain rules and regulations)"]
I don’t normally take offence at avatars but I remember Nigel Beale’s pic when he wrote blogs for the Guardian used to drive me nuts. So much so that I never bothered to read what he had written.
In my head I certainly wrote an essay deconstructing the photo – narcissist posing as thoughtful critic who doesn’t pull his punches.
The video has been removed so I am none the wiser. [ed.'s note: I've found another link!]
A) That avatar featured Nigel with a pipe, didn’t it, ET? [ed.'s note: no, as we can see, above, he's extracting his ambitious tongue for its weekly scraping ] I seem to remember feeling that everyone who saw that picture surely wanted to slap him as a result; not too hard, of course.
B) Luckily, I had the foresight to download Nigel’s vid (feeling that it was inevitable that some large-hearted casual acquaintance, or mental health professional, would urge Nige to remove it)… I’ll re-upload and re-post it when the Time Fairy grants me a visit. All in defense of Literature, obviously.
C) I do like the idea of a year-old (and counting) comment thread. Slowing the heartbeat (by having too little time to post often, these days) extends the longevity. I’ve lost most of the traffic, as a result, but what it loses in global reach, TET gains in Gemütlichkeit, man. Have another pretzel and a shoulder-rub from Heidi…?
D) Here’s some of Nigel’s BS, on the Guardian, of which you speak (from way back in 2008) and my rebuttal of it:
It’s one of the most contentious debates in the literary blogosphere, but its roots stretch back more than 2,000 years. Is realism, “lifeness” or verisimilitude a necessary quality of good literature?
Former Guardian books editor James Wood argues forcefully that it is, and in so doing has trampled on and trounced some glamorous, bulgy, iconic American novels. This has fuelled fireworks and lit up a lot of Yankees. Votaries of Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo are particularly hostile. Wood’s extolling of “lifeness” and character as key to “how fiction works” has resulted in much red-flagged response from those who favour avant garde experimentalism. Attacks have been frenzied and in some cases gratuitously insulting. Much of the name calling can be put down to envy – Wood writes better than almost all comers – or a misplaced national pride – how dare this upstart limey besmirch our holy texts. [... etc]
my comment:
James Wood is superb. He’s nonpareil and sui generis and very, very good. Let’s be frank: people need to be told what to read and how to read it; they need to know if something they’ve already read and enjoyed was the wrong thing to read (and enjoy); they need to have their minds closed to self-indulgent nonsense of the unfettered imagination and opened to older (or older-type) books about good human topics such as how to think and behave. People need this and James Wood gives it to them in a way that makes them feel smart to read it. Anyone who quibbles with this, or compares James Wood unfavorably (in every metric but showbiz) to a prodigiously open-minded writer/critic such as V.S. Pritchett, implying that James Wood will fade into obscurity when he’s run out of innovative books to bash… is just being mean and silly. I don’t subscribe to the “Barren Governess” theory of Mr. Wood’s work (that he’s often reminiscent of a frustrated spinster, snatching and fussing at the gifted children his fertile betters have placed in his care) at all.
There will always be people who are happy to read rehashings of impressionistic praise for Henry James and James Wood will always be their man, and godsbless him for it. And godsbless his votaries, too.
noo gyumn kly gij TOSSER hkot llo ( typed whilst spluttering on the floor, fingers reaching up to computer keyboard on the table and hitting typing keys randomly – the sun rises and sets as all this takes place )
I’m still deep in Infinite Jest ( I’m a very slow, late at night reader ) and a few night’s back read a sequence/chapter that shines out in its use of language and ability to express oneself in language.
Wood is obviously tired of reviewing books and feels he has bigger fish to fry. A certain sort of critic often falls into the trap of narrowing the range of what they think their chosen art-form should be in order to airily dismiss anything that isn’t that.
ET, if people who read The New Yorker actually read more books and read these books well they’d never put up with Wood’s goofy proscriptions; the problem being that too many people read book reviews in lieu of reading books, now… it’s quicker to skim a review, they get to be told what to think and they feel improved… this bit applies to Yankees, of course… by the aura of some dour British cunt capable of generating sentences each containing more than one subordinate clause. The aspirational readers of the NYer are suckers for that sort of thing. Only a close-reader will pick up on the fact that Wood’s intellectual reach is limited by the reality of his thalidomide flippers.
Not that Wood’s an idiot… the idiots are his arse-suckers, like Nigel. Wood is quite right to milk the situation as long as the rubes allow it. But if any one thing undermines Wood’s actual seriousness, or usefulness, as a critic, it has to be the little blurb Wood has graced Nigel’s site with. It reads, in full:
“I wanted to thank you for your many generous and intelligent words about my new book How Fiction Works (and other stuff)…I get great pleasure from reading your blog.”
Critic, James Wood, The New Yorker.”
This, remember, from the man who sneered all over Don DeLillo for writing the masterpiece Underworld. So, to recap: Wood has a problem with Don DeLillo’s style, but he gets pleasure from reading the dimly tepid (sometimes plagiarizing) droppings of his biggest arse-sucker. Which makes sense. On the other hand, we find things like this (at a place called Shigekuni):
I was reading Nigel Beale’s website, just going through and being more and more stunned by the idiocy that permeated damn near everything he published online. At that point I googled “NIGEL BEALE IS A FUCKING TWAT.” This is the first thing that came up.
Thank you so much for this.
Comment by Kate June 21, 2009 @ 7:39 am
And so the world makes sense again.
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UPDATE
If you follow the bookchat game at all, you know that J. Lethem has just dropped a belated hit-back at J. Wood for pissing on one of his babies. Now, Wood partisans (incl. the cryptos) are very busy trying to curry favor with Cap’n Woody by hitting back at Lethem’s hit-back…
The core problem being that you can no longer trust what writers or critics have to say: this is a venal era, ethics are dead, everyone’s scrambling for that little scrap of connected advantage… ambition makes liars of us all.
The simple calculation for your average unknown published author and/or blogger is who, or what, it’s safer to align oneself with: Literature itself (which, as we know, is not inclined to do anyone favors) or a “powerful” critic. Anyone who’d hoped to see the inspiring spectacle of masses of word-mad Litbloggers battling Wood’s neoconservative attempt to reduce the wild infinities of Literary Imagination to a prim, dull park in front of a luxury high-rise full of Bellows’s , James’s and Norman-Bloody-Rushes… will have, by now, been bitterly disappointed.
Because there’s always that chance that Wood will touch the mediocre light of his dreary wand to the blurb-stickers on your epic, right? Why make a “powerful” enemy? Why bother with the Truth? That’s generously presuming that the cheerleaders in question are sharp enough to know the Truth when they read it, with or without the ethical fortitude to then tell it like it is.
But, no, I’m not disappointed at all because I know human nature too well.
And, no: agreeing with much of Lethem’s extreme staircase-wit-type “take down” doesn’t mean I care for Lethem’s twee, post-yuppie bunk. Still, even Lethem’s bunk required a Literary Imagination, and Lethem’s free access to its (easiest) trillion acres, and I’m on the side of any effort that can claim that pedigree… as ill-advised a “career move” as that allegiance may be.
IMPOSSIBLE TALES #1: THE RING (flash ficciones on TET)
There was a bear stretched to its full standing height, perhaps even up on its tiptoes, shaking the branch of a tree (she wished she could say exactly what kind of a tree but being a city kid she couldn’t) for whatever reason that would undoubtedly make utter sense to a bear, but the thing about the bear that was truly noteworthy (and made her assume at first she was dreaming) was its tee shirt. It was easily legible in the early morning light, the letters (black on white cotton) arranged in three fat lines like a stoner’s haiku bulging across the barrel contour of the animal’s chest: That Which Does Not /Kill Me /Pisses Me Off.
Because of the animal’s great height (she wasn’t a wizz at estimating lengths and distances but it had to be nine feet tall) the dirty tee shirt appeared to be a cut-off and gave the bear, with its exposed belly (coated in rills of articulated grime like tire-ridged curbsnow), a vaguely gay appearance. Not that there’s anything wrong with a gay bear. She’d have to get off her own belly and climb out of her sleeping bag and peek from a better angle to determine the bear’s sex with any certainty and common sense advised against it. Not that curiosity wasn’t berating her with its distant, cat-killing, megaphone voice.
Her little cafeteria argument with Aaron Waldauer about bears and periods suddenly came back to haunt her with a vengeance that would have had the brat in hysterics if he had but known. A lingering toenail of moon was visible behind the bear’s ear and that plus several rindy clouds and the thickening spume of a vapor trail made Zoey think of debris in a swimming pool and the time she’d spotted a ring on the blue tiles at the bottom of the deep end and frog-kicked down to scoop it up and bring it to the surface like a pearl diver. Only to present it to Judy wrapped in lavender tissue and have Judy lose it.
Mom (who’d announced long ago that referring to her as “Judy” was perfectly acceptable, though Zoey, after toying with the option for a day or two, had reverted to the standard with a shiver of wise relief) was in one of her comas. Screwed so deep into the mass of her dreamless sleep and exhaling through a mouth like a sprung valise full of gold the rich breath of Marlboro and Merlot she reeled back again with her snore. Zoey decided against waking her. She was glad they’d been good campers: their bloody garbage was deposited in a proper receptacle downwind. She also hoped that the air horn, the primordial fire extinguisher and the Taser (on loan from a possessive Mountie) were all where she thought they were (except the fire extinguisher, which was in the car) in the tent.
A shower of pine needles from the agitated branch glittered in the bright air like a static display that continued to function a while after the bear (satisfied, frustrated or simply bored) ambled off and the bear hadn’t been gone for five minutes before Zoey began doubting what she had clearly seen and wouldn’t remember again until coming to in a fog in her flower-choked hospital suite after the mastectomy.
A. George Walton was born in 1809, child of a black father and white mother and died in prison about twenty eight years later, having lived as a man who was good-looking in a manner that predated all hope of appreciation, as if a painting by Yves Tanguy had found its way back to the dawn of the 19th century only to inspire baffled glares and lots of kicks in the pants, as though a kick in the pants was the only persuasive critique his critics could improvise to respond to the singularity of his appearance: the loopy curls of broth-colored hair, the tawny skin, the full lips and a high-bridged nose sporting freckles… this, remember, during an era when leaded-white faces and lips like incisions were considered the essence of beauty.
B. Von Ziegeldorff drove into town every Friday night to patronize a low club called The Chicken Shack which was famous for appealing to blacks. The drive in from his villa in a wooded, nearly-rustic suburb of Potsdam through the throb of weekend traffic often took ninety minutes, during which he either had time to nurture his grievances against society in general and women specifically or listen to an instructional cassette of Advanced English for Germans. Somewhere in the lonely vastness of his car there was also a misplaced cassette of Callas he was suddenly in the mood to hear again after a year-long estrangement from that exquisitely bullying voice, the voice of high culture, because he’d been listening to far too much soul music recently.
C. Ramses sneaks a peek at the graying blonde as she steers gravely home. Or so he assumes. She reaches over and switches on the sound system. The fantasy, obviously, is that they will do the dirty without exchanging so much as a single word and she’s afraid that Ramses will ruin it now by saying a word. She doesn’t know that Ramses Gordon knows the rules of this game so well that he might have invented it; that he can play it blindfolded and has on more than one occasion and that he is thinking, also, against the background of the anti-erotic aria from Lucia Lammermoor, how differently blacks and whites absorb the behavioral proscriptions of Christianity. How this difference has a measurable impact on the respective copulatory styles of the races. How they fuck and how we live. Their guilt and our shrugs and the sacrificial sacrament of chicken.
A. Across the broad map of his short life, having been abandoned at an early age by parents driven chiefly by sexual logic through a low-walled maze of poverty, George Walton served almost a third of his earthly existence in prison. Born James, alias George, alias Jonas, alias James, alias Burley, alias Chick or Chicken John.
B. There was one black in particular. Von Ziegeldorff had made the mistake, early on, of running after all of them at once, like a kitten in a fishpond, therefore catching none, but being observant and far from stupid he soon took note of the fact that the old hands were patiently bedding one after another of the finest specimens the club had to offer, merely by choosing one and bringing to bear a convincing ersatz of passion until the goal was achieved (or quota met) and thereafter moving on. Every black girl in the club, of course, thinks of herself as The One who will prove to be so irresistible that the game will stop with her, therefore perpetuating the game.
C. Look at this respectable middle-aged German lady, for example. The grimly determined look on her face (this is supposed to be fun, lady); the way she clutches that steering wheel as though it’s hot with current: she feels Christ’s eyes on her, his disappointment in her, his weary sneer of disgust. Her husband has no problem with her little Liebesaffären… he encourages her because it absolves him of guilt for his substantial porno expenses. Christ is not so easygoing about it. Christ is not quite so cool. He plagues her with subliminal remonstrations (in which his lips never move, spookily, but his sad eyes pierce her). She wasn’t even raised in an overtly Christian family because Germans are traditionally pagan and she believes that she believes in fucking as a kind of physical therapy. A higher form of jogging. Far more therapeutic if she fucks an Asian, a Native American, or a Black. That’s what she thinks she thinks a liberal West German should believe they feel about it. But a stern (and vaguely oriental) Christ has the last word on all that and she has to hide the physical act itself behind all kinds of masks and filters to smuggle the pleasure out of Hell like a red hot trinket between her legs without fainting.
A. As a boy the tragic mulatto was the object of lazy sport among the poor whites of his acquaintance, though when he was kicked in the seat of his dusty breeches it was as a kind of running gag or after-thought, rarely with enough force to mean tears. As a manchild George fed himself by doing odd jobs for neighbors and once spent a summer doing back-breakingly honest labor for a farmer who paid him with two counterfeit five-dollar bills. “Well nigh half of what was owing me,” as handsome James alias George alias Chicken John put it. A philosophical turning point.
B. Earletta Goins was a would-be disco singer with her own little cassette out called The Story of My Life, released by a local label, an independent based in East Berlin and on this particular Friday night Von Ziegeldorff tipped the DJ a substantial amount to play both sides of Earletta’s cassette, as well as subsidizing free beers for all the patrons in the club (about two hundred people) for the duration of the cassette’s play, making for a good mood and plenty of people on the dance floor to dance beside VZ and Earletta while they danced with attention-getting self-consciousness to her disco music, which was neither truly bad nor truly good but fell within the range of most things.
C. The bedroom smells like… what? A kitchen. It smells vaguely of chicken not fried but stewed. Disgusting. On the walls flanking the massive bed, one on each, are two large wood-framed photos meant to resemble very old oil paintings. There is one of the lady in question and the other of her husband, or what looks like her husband or could be an Ex and they are dressed up to look like an Iroquois chief and his squaw… the weak-chinned fellow sports an enormous feathered head dress. His lady, in real life the gray-haired blonde on her back on the bed with her eyes closed and her legs up like an as-yet-unstuffed Christmas goose, is black-haired and light-eyed in her sepia tone photo and neither reveal the subtlest shade of mirth, self-mockery, defensive irony or even decent embarrassment in the portraits.
A. After another period of backbreaking in the Charlestown shipyards and then aboard a fishing smack with the olfactory bloom of an African cathouse’s toilet, Walton fell in with a hook-nosed ex-convict named Symmes who mentored him in the trade of bank robbing, the craft of which George failed fully to master, being neither self-righteous nor brutal enough with his pistol, landing in prison in 1824 for a six month sentence after which he dabbled unchastened in the lighter art of the highwayman… with just as little talent. When Walton wasn’t busy being apprehended (being a mulatto in early 19th century America was a liability in the incognito game), it was easy if unremunerative work, as most of his victims chose to toss him their wallets and flee rather than tussle or risk injury at the hands of a thieving diabolical coon with freckles.
B. “I must confess,” shouted VZ, “I have never before seen a lady of your race with these green eyes of such beauty,” and he mimed his own astonishment, hands on his heart as though it might burst, for also her skin was the color of the pancakes he’d been mad for on his legendary trip across America, during which being a slave to this crude delicacy had given him an insight into the American psyche he was sure he could apply to the swift achievement of his goal.
C. Ramses imagines, quite vividly, the chin-free husband answering the telephone on one of those interminable Sundays of petty household chores choreographed to the pandering drone of television, the day on which long-married Germans speak less than a sentence to each other and he envisions the man of the household putting a hand over the receiver and lifting an eyebrow and invoking, yet again, the worn-out magic of his wife’s name as though it were a mild rebuke, tonally, or the long-suffering request to please stop something.
A. It was only when Walton came upon intended victim John Fenno, returning one evening from a dance across the old Chelsea bridge, that he met resistance and his fate. Fenno was a beefy man and sprang from his cart to wrestle Walton rather than part with his coins or jewelry, invigorated as he was by sexual frustration; had the dance been successful things may well have turned out differently; as it was, the robbery was thwarted though Walton escaped, but not before trying and failing to punish Fenno with a bullet. A suspender buckle saved Fenno’s life and doomed George as he was soon captured.
B. Driving on the fast black road towards his villa before dawn with gems of sparse precipitation fixed like glass moths to his glittering windshield, VZ found himself bedeviled by a sickening internal debate as to whether he dare risk slipping into the stereo his rediscovered cassette dub of a valuable reel-to-reel bootleg of the one-time-only performance of Callas doing Lammermoor with the notorious unscored E-flats included… punishingly high notes Callas tries for with laudable brio but misses, grazing the first E-flat with such a grasping shade of the pitch that it’s almost a blue note and chipping the second with a Levantine fraction redolent of the bazaar. In every subsequent performance she eschewed the dreaded E-flats entirely. Wisely. As far as VZ knew, he was the only one on Earth in possession of this wounded version of Donizetti’s lugubrious masterpiece, a discarded run-through of Callas’s premier performance of the piece in Mexico City, 1953, and he felt a craving just then to hear it. Despite the fact that there in the white leather seat beside him was his prize, Earletta Goins, slouched with drowsy pliancy, a half smile playing on her chewable lips, lips he fully envisioned in contact with the freckled red glans of his penis and VZ had to think long and hard before changing the sexual weather in his Porsche just then. He could only imagine the anti-aphrodisiacal effect an opera would have on this colored American sex machine. He could only imagine his future grief at never knowing the warm weight of those lips and the breathlessness of those strong brown unshaved legs crushing the breath out of him.
C. Wifey’s on her stomach, moaning and kicking, both hands locked under her thrashing pelvis making an extravagant display of humping alone. Some guy must have told her, thirty years ago, as an excuse for not touching her, that it turns him on. She’s waistless, veiny and pale as old frogs. Ramses very quietly puts his cold dangle of dick away and hitches his pants back up and sneaks out of the bedroom as the gnadige frau whips her egg into its bad-lathered glory. Down the hall and to the left the second floor bathroom door is open and sizzling with the sound of a midday shower and Ramses’s interest is piqued. Is it hubby, home early from work? A nubile daughter, out of school for the day with a chest cold? An impertinent maid, a poltergeist or a poor relation? Ramses eases up towards the invitingly open bathroom door on the plush white carpet, carrying his shoes, boldly curious, holding his breath, with little or no backup plan in place if anyone should catch him.
A. Faced with the gravity of his final punishment, Walton directed that a copy of his memoirs be bound in his own tawny skin and presented to the very Mr. Fenno whom George was sent to the gallows for trying to shoot. White historians take George Walton’s avowal that the gesture was one of esteem for Fenno’s bravery at face value, unfamiliar with the bitter nuances of colored irony. His skin, stripped in a supple parallelogram from his still-warm back after the hanging, was treated to look like a gray deer skin by the tanner, who delivered the stuff without comment to Peter Low the book binder, the latter of perhaps a less pragmatic disposition and therefore much disturbed by the job and suffering increasingly vivid nightmares the rest of his life.
B. I’ve spent so much time and money on this one dream of making sweet love with an Afro-American and on the very threshold of all that and more I decide to risk ruining the sexy mood that all of my efforts have managed by some miracle to put her into with a blast of my so-called high culture? Am I crazy?
C. What Ramses witnesses through the fogged, beaded, soap-scummed shower door is a jug-eared middle-aged black man with love handles and a sagging ass, the cheeks of which are matte and blacker than the rest of him, his large head crowned with a cap of webby, water-matted hair. Who is this man? Where does he fit in the cosmology? Was the guy in the Iroquois photo the Ex or is this the Ex and are things much kinkier around the homestead than Ramses first imagined? This avuncular apparition of a black man with the posture of an utterly defeated specimen. His left armpit foams as he scrubs at it with an eerie lack of energy more suitable to a nursing home sitz bath than a home owner’s shower; it’s like he’s preparing for his own execution. It is a joyless, prosaic, song-free ablution so full of truth that Ramses backs away from the threshold in waves of nausea and a paradoxical joy in his own life, the details of which he can claim as otherwise impossible, his uniqueness in time, the song of his soul in this skin.
TET HOUSE (the imaginary publisher) is PROUD to LINK to
[ed.'s note: the emphatically mystical Lit Machine that is Neil Addison has sent material from exotic climes... last seen doing a samba at sunrise... behold these excerpts from -and link to- his gorgeous New Thing...]
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The Little Book of Forfeits: A Foreword
The following manuscript was discovered in a beige Gola kitbag at the edge of a deep-seated lake within the confines of Martin Mere, shortly after the poet’s drowning. As such, it might be considered Frank Ahoy’s parting squib.
Splenetic, scabrous, and ultimately quixotic, time and again we find Ahoy lambasting the contemporary world within these brief pages, smiting any number of its tentacles only to witness improved versions shooting out from these same stumps in record time with renewed vigour. At some point, I believe, it must have dawned on Ahoy that far from causing this monster any injury – never mind accounting for its downfall – he was simply pruning the beast through his best efforts and paving the way for its exponential growth. While this theory exists as pure conjecture on my part, I do believe that this same realisation was instrumental in Ahoy’s demise, if not the sole reason for it.
And while I maintain serious reservations about the eye-witness testimony of Hedley Lawson, it nonetheless delights me – as a friend of Ahoy’s – to think that a flock of Bolivian geese should choose that very moment – the moment when the poet submerged – to bolt in unison, ten thousand strong, a mob of wingéd resolve.
Tim Spinks (Chair Of Indignant Media, Burscough Community College)
_
Forfeit No.1:
Impossible Is As Impossible Does
(Deposition Before The I.O.C)
I was under orders from nike. They suggested that I don an adidas singlet and then fall behind decisively in the marathon of my choice, arms flailing, a turbine of failure taking the pulse of my parents’ late despair and pronouncing it bang on the money.
I did ask if I could come second to last instead and they told me no, not if you want to get paid. You should amount to an act of desertion – the judas of athleticism – blubbering away like the immediate next of kin.
This is why I cuckolded my fabled stamina and how my legs turned to crime.
Forfeit No.3
Tony Blair is a type of cape Canaveral. He counts down from ten, as if threatening to do more than behave like tony blair on a loop; then he blasts off like an altogether scary rationale.
The roman catholic church is his mission control. “What do you reckon?” Asks Tony, outlying the orbit that he might sequester its gyrations in prayer.
You look fantastic, the church says. Like superman in one of his films when he throws a tantrum and then retreats to the heavens, disgusted by planet earth as a whole.
This is exactly what tony blair has had in his mind from the very beginning. He dares to look back over his left hand shoulder and discovers that the West Bank has configured itself into a shortlist for Best Supporting Penitent. God’s knighthood, after everything, is waiting for him there.
Excerpted from ‘The Gangsters of Literature: A Brief Life of Frank Ahoy’ by Tim Spinks (Chair of Indignant Media, Burscough Community College), Verlag Hedley Lawson (2010)
Frank Ahoy subscribed to a theory of transmission in relation to his writing, basing this theory on an instructive dream which visited the poet at intervals and always featured the same outcome. As the disturbing repetition wound itself up, Ahoy would find himself arrested by otherworldly creatures while attempting to flee Planet Earth, having reached that active threshold where such an escape might, perchance, occur (although the routes chosen by Ahoy differed each time, his fate was, at this point, unswerving).
With these assembled beings towering over the squat poet on stork-like legs, Ahoy was asked, by way of telepathy, to give up his language to the group (with the symbolic alacrity of dreams, Frank Ahoy’s vocabulary now materialised en masse, contained inside a tartan suitcase carried in the poet’s right hand). There was no clear understanding between the parties as to what this request signified, and Ahoy could not tell whether his co-operation promised freedom, leniency, or no such thing. Was it a prerequisite for the journey ahead, a real-time adjudication, a merciful sham, or else an instance of dialectical frottage? There was no way of knowing. Either the creatures were as impassive as they appeared or else Ahoy lacked the wherewithal to detect their passions. (The faces of these aliens were saddle-shaped, off-white, and indented with sparse features). Irrespective of his confusion, or perhaps because of it, Frank gave the suitcase up without protest each time.
Immediately the creatures opened his baggage wide, but finding nothing inside to prosecute – or nourish themselves? – except day-old newspapers, they proceeded to rip these apart and place the torn strips in their weird mouths. After an age, the creatures regurgitated this substance onto the ground, stooped to consider the mess, and then began patting it into shapes with their fragile digits. It was Frank Ahoy’s strenuous need to interpret these shapes which roused him from his slumber at this point, and had the poet reaching for one of those stubby blue biros pilfered from William Hill, scattered about his night-stand, anxious to record these impossible dimensions.
It was in this fashion that the ‘Forfeit’ series of poems took on form.
Personally, I believe it was this same perceived ‘sourcing’ of the text which allowed Ahoy to approach his own work in performance as though reading it for the very first time, with assiduous bafflement, as if he had acquired the uncanny ability to disown the language at hand and label it as ‘other’ whilst exploring this same estrangement in depth. This quizzical interrogation, in its most extreme manifestations, saw the poet refusing to give voice to certain words as they appeared on the page, spluttering at the sight of them, summoning instant neologisms or else employing decisive mispronunciations instead (at such times, a tragic gaiety had the run of Ahoy’s face, operating its muscles like an inebriated puppet-master apprised that the rot had set in already, expediting the destruction of his own cherished stage).
*
Tuesday and an unexpected windfall through the post in the form of a 16gb memory stick, minus any preface or instruction (the hardware is brandless on the outside and coloured British Racing Green). I deliberate over this curious arrival for the best part of an hour, but there is little for me to deduce without first plugging the stick into my wind-up laptop (bought on the the Dock Road, North of Millers Bridge Industrial Estate, and designed to meet the general needs of the Third World).
So I do crank up the machine, take all necessary steps, and the computer gestates this new connection for the best part of thirty seconds (the process sounds like a teacher – on the verge of a nervous breakdown – repeating her name backwards on a blackboard with chalk). Then, all of a sudden, numerous icons appear on the laptop’s murky screen, arranged in a pyramidal formation; and inside each of these folders, a quartet of video files.
Afterwards, days follow nights, and as they both pass me by I keep these JPEGS on shuffle for I cannot tell you how long – confronted with my greatest wish – as they induce in me a bearable trance-state.
Here is Frank Ahoy on camera, flouting his mortality, both feet shy of the grave.
A fortnight later, as I move to throw out the accompanying jiffy bag – as an act of negligible exorcism – I find a large plastic badge lodged inside, down amongst the bubble-wrap (it appears to be the creation of a Mister Maker badge making kit). The badge employs a Gotham typeface and reads as follows:
“Instead of pretending at trying to eradicate poverty we should be learning to perfect it. The goal should not be ‘sustainable growth’ but sustainable poverty. Wherever poverty means starvation, humiliation and ignorance the definition of the word ‘poverty’ has gone wrong. Not being able to afford a Ferrari should not equal death: quite the opposite. Poverty should mean the time and freedom to think, play, live. Birds exist in poverty but they sing and they fly. Nature is poverty; the pursuit of the accumulation of wealth is a neurosis. As long as the wealthy print our dictionaries we will misunderstand this. We suffer the direct and indirect effects of Lucrosis.”
-Napoleon Fanon
(forget ye not to use the “cc” button, lower right on player, for the film)
I few weeks back I read the thing about “Q.R. Markham”, the feller who cobbled together a bunch of stolen spy texts and got the result published to rave reviews. At the time I assumed he was some kind of PoMod trickster with ice water for blood. It seems he isn’t… just some poor schlub who tried to get away with something and failed. You know how it goes: commit war crimes on a genocidal scale and you get a bestselling memoir published; plagiarize some spy novels and get yourself inundated with death threats.
“Q.R. Markham” turns out to be the no-less-pseudonymous-sounding “Quentin Rowan” and he’s just posted an article about his naughty escapade in some zine called THE FIX… as a sort of AA testimonial. Rowan is what’s called an “abstinent alcoholic”, apparently. One glowing irony being that it’s clear from Rowan’s article that he could’ve scribbled together a decent spy thriller on his own (and it must have taken almost as much time to make the stolen texts harmonize into a coherent book as it would have been to do a book from scratch). But what grabbed me about this little episode was the whole (crypto-Christian) “addiction” business (aka The Rehab Industry aka Detox Addiction). I left the following comment on Rowan’s article; if you’re not bamboozled by the deeply-dishonest implications of most “Self Help” psychobabble (ie: we are immortals progressing, the long hard way, toward a responsible citizenship in Heaven) you might consider the philosophical implications…
“Reading the article about the “abstinent alcoholic” who made a big splash by having his detournement of the lowliest form of genre fiction published… I began thinking (again) about this Addiction meme. It’s very, very popular in the Anglo-American sphere these days. But what does it mean? Because aren’t Humans (or living things, in general) “addicts” by definition? We like certain sensations and go out of our way (structuring our lives around them) to repeat these sensations. It’s only when the pursuit of these sensations interferes with our PRODUCTIVITY that the pursuit is called an “addiction”. Has anyone ever been called a “money addict”?
I’ve never been drunk (or had more than about 10cc of alcohol) or dabbled in any drug (other than, cough, LSD)… but I certainly understand the lure. Because logically facing the brutal mechanism of Existence (and its stark limitations… aka… eternal Death) pushes many sensitive souls into logic-blurring pursuits. I’d hate to see a friend or loved one become a stinking, mumbling mess because of heroin or booze but… you know; that’s just me being selfish. We all end up in the same box, kids. Deal with it how you can. But ninety years of “sobriety” or thirty five years of a Charlie Parker-style death-spiral are not, versus 4.3 billion years of the Earth’s oblivious existence, much different.”
*
*
[ed.'s note: painting by the fabtastulous Todd Schorr]
Comrade ET! And a MERRY NEW-THANX-O-WEENMAS KWANZUKKAH to You, too!
I saw that meta-comment of yours in the GUblog Markham thread and chuckled, so it wasn’t wasted. Post-modernism is so complicated these days because nothing is not post-modern, anymore. Imagine if nothing had not been Cubist? Or if nothing had not been Gothic or Baptist? Hard to know what being a Baptist means or does when nothing is not Baptist.
Enjoy the new work and remember that pushing the boundaries of your Art shouldn’t mean lying in a fish tank with a hungry hyena… or something.
(As one of your fellow original 5,000 fans of the Checkered Demon, I have to ask you if you think his change of pants suits him or looks a little… what’s the word I want? Not “Gay”, of course. Never.)
…when his rum-soaked, two-ton fruitcake style works and when it doesn’t…
“He learned to appreciate the singular little thrill of following dark byways
in strange towns, knowing well that he would discover nothing, save filth,
and ennui, and discarded “merry-cans” with “Billy” labels, and the jungle
jingles of exported jazz coming from syphilitic cafés. He often felt that the
famed cities, the museums, the ancient torture house and the suspended gar-
den, were but places on the map of his own madness.” (yes)
VS
“He contemplated the pyramids of Ladorah (visited mainly
because of its name) under a full moon that silvered the sands
inlaid with pointed black shadows. He went shooting with the
British Governor of Armenia, and his niece, on Lake Van. From
a hotel balcony in Sidra his attention was drawn by the manager
to the wake of an orange sunset that turned the ripples of a
lavender sea into goldfish scales and was well worth the price
of enduring the quaintness of the small striped rooms he shared
with his secretary, young Lady Scramble.” (no)
-
The second paragraph crumbles. Something off about “silvered” and “lavender”. It’s just bad poetry, isn’t it? Like using “cerulean” in a description of the sky. Even “orange”… while not being kitsch… is unnecessary. Vlad subscribed to over-description.
His great works are very often like the city of Berlin, where the grandest studies in ornate architectural elegance neighbor tacky horrors. Vlad’s work is too often encased in an aura of canonical amber, beyond reproach; critical research in Nabokov studies is usually preoccupied with riddle-chasing or tasks itself with merely explaining why everything works so beautifully. But everything doesn’t!
One plausible explanation for Lolita‘s near-perfection is the balancing “vulgarity” and banality of its subject and setting; that and its blessed brevity… the opposite of Ada in many ways. No writer is so much better than even the worst writer that she/he isn’t available to teach by negative example.
—
Merry Fucking Crypto-Pagan Whatever, All Ye Friends So Lurking and Explicit!
I leave you with this (and so much for the racist cliche of Black women supposedly having gargantuan asses by genetic law, eh?):
Just struggled through “The Reader” which has some good bits at the beginning ( not the sex scenes! Though they do contain bits ) but which in its attempts to be uber-liberal/humanist ends up appearing to suggest that learning to read Chekhov can absolve the lead character ( an illiterate ex SS officer ) of her complicity in the extermination of Jews.
Or if it didn’t do that it confused the issue so much that it was impossible to tell which was worse.
The film is a classic of the “Preposterous Liberal Wet Dream Fantasy Which Does The Opposite Of What It Intends” genre. Four stars.
Comrade ET! Hope you enjoyed the transition into this, the Final Year of Recorded History (according to some calendars)! And I hope you have time, later, to speak of your wild Artistic adventures abroad. (Yes, and, believe it or not, when the odd hour or two tore itself free this month I managed to do good work on the video project you contributed those paintings to! I believe in the Geologic Timescale, man. Life and Art are sweeter… more Mediterranean… that way… )
Re: Ze Reader: I know what you were thinking: “Kate Winslet and her body-double’s teats [ed.'s note: no, they were inserted via Computer Graphics... see illustration]; how can I go wrong?” And yet it went so terribly wrong. Mostly because you aren’t German. The whole “good Nazi” thing doesn’t speak to you. You know, of course, that a few brass-balled Amnesiacs around here sometimes agitate to call attention to the searing matter of German suffering during (and immediately after) WW2!
I had an idea for a film script, called “Getting Away With It”, in which a Nazi doctor type, named, oh, Hubertus Strughold, gets up to all kinds of very naughty pseudo-medical nastiness in the name of “research” during the war, then wins a first class ticket to the US when the party’s over, starts working for the Yanks, ends up getting a street in Texas named after him! A Cinderella Story. Still waiting for all of Hubertus’ next of kin, former colleagues and close friends to die off before I start on it. Obviously.
Whilst I’m not German ( although I was conceived of in Germany. Bored mother having affair with soldier whilst her husband rounded up der Winsletts ) I am prepared to give most ideas a hearing if the art is good and the arguments are strong. In response to your Lolita comment upstream I’d say the strength of the book is not only in its prose but the fact that he puts you in an awkward position of being the confidant of Humbert and if he doesn’t exactly win your sympathy he gives you an insight into the delights and torture of sustaining a paedophile’s lifestyle. Somewhere you’d normally not want to be in a million years.
The arguments in the Reader weren’t good however. The makers seemed more concerned with the humanising, redemptive qualities of reading quality lit. Ralph Fiennes was in it too. Doesn’t he remember the films he’s been in [ed.'s note: well he did play an historical personage, who had a dubious relationship with Fascism, in The English Patient]? In Schindler’s List he gave a quality demonstration of how you can listen to classical music whilst slaughtering Jews at the same time. But here he was another weepy-eyed do-gooder trying to save e by reading her books.
“( although I was conceived of in Germany. Bored mother having affair with soldier whilst her husband rounded up der Winsletts )”
Well done, ET, you do NOT look your age! Pilates? Tantric (aka Sting-ish) Yoga? What’s the secret(ion)?
Re: Lolitha (sic): perceptive comment but I was always “pulling for” (har) Quilty. Ever see the absolutely horrid film Sue Lyon ended up in after the highpoint of Kubrick’s Lolita? So bad it’s… very, very bad:
I’m a mere 55 SA but the Winslett herding went on for years due to the skill in which they dug themselves immediately into the new administration.
To return to The Reader what was odd was that the film never once shone a light on all the older people who had assumed power and asked “What did you do?” Bruno Ganz was one of those people in the film. Had they never watched “Downfall”?
His books can be awfully mawkish but occasionally Heinrich Boll makes some very acute observations about the “smoothness” of the changeover in post-war Germany.
People sometimes wonder, over brunch or in editorials, ET, why the Policia aren’t a little harder on the Nuevo Nazties (I’m writing in code now, in case you’re wondering) over here and I often think, in response, that the answer to that one is rather staring us (or me) in the face. Whatever I mean by that.
‘Suspicions’ about Pablo Neruda’s death but none about John Lennon’s! Classic.
Since no nation, understandably, seems willing to confront the ugly matter of its own legacy of Key Conspiracies, may I suggest that the various nations swap assorted investigations? Ie, America can work on exposing Putin’s skullduggery (eg Smolensk), Russia can expose 9/11 and/or the JFK event, Ireland can unearth the facts about Fukushima, Japanese researchers can expose the agenda behind the recent False Flag in Norway… and so on…
Pablo Neruda, Chile’s Nobel Prize-winning poet, would have been a powerful voice in exile against the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. But that all changed just 24 hours before Neruda was to flee the country in the chaos following the 1973 military coup.
He was 69 years old and suffering from prostate cancer when he died, exactly 12 days after the brutal coup that ended the life of his close friend, socialist President Salvador Allende.
The official version was that he died of natural causes brought on by the trauma of witnessing the coup and the lethal persecution of many of his friends.
Some Chileans have questioned that official telling of Neruda’s death and instead suspected foul play at the hands of Pinochet’s regime. Those doubts could get a public airing as Chile’s Communist Party asks that Neruda’s body be exhumed for testing to address long-simmering suspicions that the poet was poisoned.
The judge investigating his death could rule at any moment that the exhumation go forward.
[Erm: if you get a "file expired" notification, Comrades, please blithely ignore it and wait a few seconds or try again... there seems to be a wobbly connection... or perhaps it's because it isn't a premium account, the bastards]
Holy shit, d00d…it took literally 5 fucking minutes for this page to load on my superfast 11 Mbps connection; for people with short attention spans, that’s like several fun-filled lifetimes. Did I say 5 minutes? The fucking page is still loading, grinding away in the background, 8 goddamn minutes after I got here. You have to re-tool, man. Aside from that, happy final year of life on earth. Mother of God…this page is STILL loading. This is insanity. I expect it’ll take all night to post this brief greeting. Well, I’ll just pop over to another browser tab and leave it to resolve itself.
Sir M! Yeah, I know… I really should start a new thread. It’s just that things are still so frazzly-hectic over here in the Faddaland and… erm… I’m a lazy bastid and… erm…
But I’ve been reading Pol Hom with great pleasure/interest; the thing about Achmed Abdullah was fascinating. Never heard of him. Yer a vital source of wondrous arcana, man! I like the new well-’ard avatar, too.
[but those loading hang-ups seem to be intermittent; the thread just loaded for me in under a minute. I suspect weird links...]
Otherwise known as my passport photo. Looking like a thug has its advantages. I can’t remember the last time some strutting cock-of-the-walk gave me a hard time: they tend to look for easier meat. Yeah, that Achmed Abdullah got me too; I’d never heard of him but what an interesting life. Hope all’s copacetic with you and yours. Gotta roll…your thread’s crashing my browser.
My computer has usually been proved to be the most primitive of those posting here and on PH but TET downloads very quickly both on the work computer and the laptop.
Keep this thread going I say. I like the sense of history.
My (benevolently) tragic lack of time plus mind-bogglingly inert inertia will conspire to keep you happy on that one, ET! It’s been so long since I started a new thread that I seem to’ve misplaced the StarFleet manual on the proper protocols… (where are the fooking dilithium crystals…?)
[ed.'s note: but we are sincerely worried that Mishari is still scraping goop out of his mainframe since his last encounter with tarry TET]
They are repeating The Singing Detective on BBC4 tonight. It might be on an iplayer facility of some sort. Less breaks than YouTube for those with some semblance of an attention span left – I do have one but January, for me is the cruellest month.
I haven’t seen it since it was first shown and will make the effort.
I can still vividly remember scene after scene of it ( not merely Patrick Malahide’s pumping buttocks in the woods ) or think I can. My memory may well be playing tricks. We shall see.
I suspect Blackeyes would be worth a second look as well. It got drowned out by “Dirty Den” headlines and puritan attitudes first time round but given all the recent hacking scandals its themes of media controlled images might well be extremely prescient.
The Singing Detective (original, of course): what a monsterpiece, ET! Gambon + Potter = A Glimpse of What Television Could Have Fucking Been (the image that stuck with me was the psoriasis, which made our protagonist resemble a glazed doughnut)
(Black Eyes missed me… probably because it couldn’t make it past Uncle Sam’s tit-filter the first time around, when TV and I still had a relationship)
(PS I always found July much crueler than either January or April, though… probably the stench, noise and revealed red flesh of the mcnugget-fed masses)
Just watched the first episode of TSD and 25 years on it still shines out.
To my relief the images and scenes I thought I remembered I did actually remember. Quite accurately as well which surprised me. I would have been equally as pleased if I had made up images of that quality too.
The boy in the tree-tops is a particularly vivid image for me.
Gambon’s litany of thoughts to try and stop himself getting an erection whilst Joanne Whalley greases him up was especially good ending with “The Guardian woman’s page ” .
Funny, ET, I just caught myself using an image from The Guardian to prevent an erection being caused by reading “getting an erection whilst Joanne Whalley greases him up”… and I beshat myself laughing, instead. Worth it…?
By the beard of Zeus!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I sincerely hope that most of your sex life isn’t at the beck and call of post-modernism though obviously it would be far more entertaining for the casual reader if it was.
I know for a fact that mind control techniques are far more effective than consumerist incentives and/or heavy-handed policing… because I use them on my daughter all the time! When I want my daughter (aka the electorate) to eat a whole bowl of broccoli, I don’t bribe her with rewards or pressure her with threats… I engage her imagination and appeal to her hardwired affinity for narrative. I can get her to eat an entire bowl of broccoli whenever I want to. This is a benign and whimsical example but the implications are profound (and very useful for parents and despots alike). The difference between bloodily inefficient Stalinist rule and American “democracy” is summed up in two words: Edward Bernays. If only our Fearless Leaders were primarily engaged in tricking us all into eating more broccoli. Think on it.
Lee Rourke, please note: not one mention of such literary qualities as penmanship or bookshelf-design in the following…
This extended conceit of a poetic ‘I’, and the notion of being accosted by a worldly, mysterious, even uncouth, yet familiar stranger, in a way that is impossible to resist, and whose effect is both profound and irrecoverable, occurs again and again in poetry and in all art. This encounter echoes what all important poetry does, irrespective of subject matter: where the reader becomes fused with its narrator, setting off on some quest and bearing witness to something both mundane and of a terrible importance that will change them forever. This strange other’s message has something to do with the getting of wisdom about man’s mortality, the attendant ills of ageing, the vanity of his enterprises, his enslavement to his passions, his suffering, his fear of failure, his lack of self-knowledge, but its mimetic meaning is you’ve just got to listen to this or you’ve just got to look at this, something about which Michael Donaghy (in ‘A Fine Excess’, his essay on John Keats) wrote most eloquently:
‘One way a poet creates the illusion of dramatic moment is to hold out his hand and show you something — an inanimate object, like Yorick’s skull, a magician’s prop towards which he directs our attention so that the magic can take place through sleight of hand. In Keats’ 1816 poem to Fanny Brawne there’s no object in his hand. It’s the hand itself he’s showing us, reaching out through the page and across a hundred and eighty-five years.’
GREATEST UNSUNG SHORTS, #56, 72 & 89:
“CALAMUS” and “CONFIDENCE” and “SYLVIE”
CALAMUS
1. Existalism
“There are three kinds of people,” said Uncle Ham, “and I use the term loosely.” I was on the dock, hands under my head, the sun soaking orange in my eyelids. I was pretending to be asleep.
“Stupid,” he said, “Smart,” he cleared his throat, “And Clever. The Clevers are Smart people who sell things to the Stupids.”
Uncle Ham was always making lists and saying sayings and some of the sayings are still with me today. “Never save money on toilet paper, rubbers, or chocolate,” was one of them. Or, “Rome burned down in a day.” He was always telling parables and spouting pronouncements. Once, while we were eating cantaloupes in his lake-view kitchen, he told me, “Don’t assume that because a woman is of Asian extraction, she’ll be extraordinary in bed. That’s racist and can lead to disappointment.” I was seven or eight at the time that he said this and now, even decades later, I can’t eat a cantaloupe without thinking of Asian women.
He invented a Religion too, my Uncle Ham did. A Religion, or at least a Philosophy, called “Existalism” and everyone who ever loved him… his various girlfriends and I, basically… were involuntary followers. He applied Existalist principles everywhere. The breakfast nook, for example.
“Don’t just woof that omelet down, boy… smell it first! Touch it. Lick it. Make a sensual study of the object. That’s the first and last one you’ll ever eat.” Or, at the Lakeville Sommerfest, pointing at a blonde in Swiss Miss braids and dirndl as she crossed the dusty Fairground, counting her tips, he’d say, gravely,
“The first and last of her kind.”
He’d rap on the bathroom door and shout in at me, “Remember what you’re doing, Eggs, because you will never do it, exactly that way, again!” Or we’d be grunting and sweating at one of his summer projects in the garden such as digging a six-foot pit near the grape arbor and he’d suddenly stick his shovel in the mud like a bookmark and come over to me, displaying a pebble in his palm like a diamond: “Voila!”
“Either everything matters,” is how he summed up his philosophy, “Or nothing does.” And that’s how he lived his life, that’s how his moods toggled, bouncing between those two cases… those nerve-wracking extremes. One morning he’d take the trouble to count your eyelashes for you (312 left; 390 right) and the next afternoon he might give you the kind of unengaged look that made you feel like you were little more than an apple in the path of his lawn mower.
Existalism. Was that what he was thinking about when he looked upon the body of Tiny Payne?
Uncle Ham was my favorite uncle; he was my only uncle, my mother’s brother. He was tall and strong and he smelled like a goat. Not that I knew (or know) what a goat smells like: I appropriated the description from my grandma West, his mother. She always smelled like Clorox herself.
I had only been there in Lakeville for two days. I was staying with Uncle Ham for the duration of that summer vacation, in 1969, while my mother experimented with living with her boyfriend. I was out on that dock, sun in my face, picturing the two together… my mother and Shep Olgilvie… while Uncle Ham quizzed me in his Existalist system. I pretended to be asleep. Imagining my mother saying something humiliating like,
-Benedict needs a father figure in his life, Shep. All he has now is his crazy Uncle Ham. He needs a positive role model. He needs a Shep Olgilvie in his life, darling.
Like Hell! I rebutted, in thought. Like Hell I need a Shep Olgilvie in my Life!
“Stupid, Smart, or Clever. Which are you going to be? How do you think you’ll turn out? Don’t answer me now, off the top of your head… think about it. Study the question.” He was always saying that, too: study the question.
“Study the question and get back to me.”
I just lay there on the splintery dock, lips parted, my corneas dialing around under the rubber of their lids in a crafty simulation of r.e.m., avoiding the conversation. Lake Veronica (Ham’s name for it) lapped with fat tongues at the algae-socked pylons supporting us. My breathing was deep, measured. I was very good at faking sleep and had eavesdropped on some of the most spectacular adult conversations in history with this technique, curled up on a living room couch or on the back seat of a Cadillac while the creakingly-old with liquor on their breath stage-whispered furiously about Hugh Hefner, or Life After Death, or the Vietnam War. Once, at the age of thirteen, I was lucky enough to hear somebody’s date at a family picnic say, on a back porch where I was pretending to be zonked on a hammock, “You can’t get fat from swallowing it, doll. Trust me. It’s the fondue.” But with Ham, this day, by feigning sleep I was only trying to excuse myself from a serious lecture I knew I was too young, at the age of ten, to be forced into.
I had seen the serious lecture coming from ten miles down the track, after he’d had that altercation with those hippie girls in the Woolworths. We’d been driving through town when Uncle Ham suddenly slammed on his brakes and put her in reverse, deciding that he wanted to go to Woolworths. He decided that he wanted to buy us a couple of water pistols. We happened upon two hippie girls shoplifting a jar of Dippity-Do and Uncle Ham said to them, standing there with an arm around my shoulder in that narrow aisle,
“How do you two flower children expect to make a beautiful new world happen if you’re both still hooked on the ugly habits of the old one?”
They just stared at him at first, their ponchos laden with dime-store booty. I remember trying to make myself taller so that the pretty one would notice me. Outside the store, Ham said, trooping ahead in stalwart befrazzlement, “And the worst thing is, that one… the pretty one… the one with the lips? The one that told me to fuck off and feel better? I know her. That’s one of mine. Her mother’s… a folk singer.” He sounded like he was lifting a bathtub of water as he said the word folksinger.
We climbed in his Nash (me in the back with the Coleman; “We’ll play Chauffeur and Bigwig today, Eggs,”) and he kept eying me in the rear-view as he drove the dirt road that snaked down to the landing. It was as though confronting those two had triggered in him a re-think of young people and I was one of them. As though I had to feel self-conscious, or even guilty, about those squalid lives, despite the fact that they were five or six years older than I. But that was the year the entire human population of the planet Earth was divided into three distinct camps. Never trust anyone over thirty. The whole world was either over thirty, or under thirty or like Ham, who was thirty.
And now he had me there out on the dock with him, asking me whose side I was on, really. His or everyone else’. The Stupids’, The Smarts’, The Clevers’ … or Uncle Ham’s?
“The answer to this question accounts for fifty percent of your final grade,” he joked. But I remained silent. Sea-gulls complained weak weak weak overhead.
“Have you studied the question? Do you need more time? Do you want a refreshment?” But I did not budge. The lake was happy licking the dock.
“I just need to know if I can count on you.”
Silence.
“Eggs.” He nudged me with a moccasin. “Are you telling me you’re asleep?”
He was sitting on the deluxe red and white Coleman Cooler janglingly gravid with bottles of Green River and Mountain Dew and grape NeHi we’d lugged along for the day. “Eggs?” He sucked his teeth. “Well at least I’ll have some privacy when I pee,” he said, theatrically, just as the wind was swelling and I heard him, with a relieved creak of the Coleman, stand up and unzip. He said “Ahhh,” and I felt the first faint twinklings of his atomized pee-spray on my bare legs yet I didn’t flinch. I steeled myself against flinching. But then the droplets gained weight and splattered my shoulder and plopped on my lips… warm…
Ham was in hysterics, clutching our jerry-rigged water pistols when I jumped up, hair wild, spitting.
“You had that coming, Eggs!” he howled.
He danced around the dock. I was mad enough to hit him with a hammer, but yea, was I not laughing, too, chasing around the dock and socking his ass which must have felt like being thrashed with gladiolas. “You had that coming, Eggs!” We ended up sitting, tongues hanging, on the edge of the dock. Ham handed me my empty pistol after re-inserting its fine-bore tip. He socked me with a very soft no-harm-done sock on my jaw (always socking me that way) and added, pointing with a leather-red finger, “Never wait longer than five minutes for justice.”
And I thought back on that remark… having carried it with soul-shaping clarity… never wait longer than five minutes for justice …at the end of the summer. When I found what I found near the grapes.
2. Evil is a Form of Stupidity
Lakeville was a beautiful town for a town has to be preternaturally beautiful for a ten-year-old boy to notice. And I noticed. It inspired in the manner of a model on a plywood plank upon which a scale railroad was built with a widower’s loupe and tweezers. There was a town center, a broad square of shops, a movie theater, plaqued boulders, quasi-colonial buildings bristling with flag poles and a j-shaped main street plus powder-soft, old-as-the-Indian, roads. The roads dispersed from main street like flat shoots grown miles from a flat black rhizome and out in the surrounding woods were houses, all apart, with Uncle Ham’s on the edge of Lake Cromwell (Lake Veronica, Ham insisted, Lake Veronica) and the only other house with a view of the lake was on the opposite bank, about the size and color of a tin of Log Cabin maple syrup. Chimney and all. Where Tiny Payne had lived.
“That be Gordie Payne yonder,” said Ham, later that day, with the hick-taunting voice he had already used to make me laugh at the breakfast table. He pointed across the lake and handed me binoculars. We had come back from our afternoon at the dock, unloaded the Coleman and vacuumed the back seat of the car. We were standing there in his front yard, preparing to toss some guts on the grill, when Uncle Ham went to get them. Just standing in Uncle Ham’s front yard, it was hard not to spy on the house across the lake. It was only a ten minute walk away if you could cut straight across the water.
“Have a look.”
I steadied the binoculars with my tooth-pick arms and zeroed in on two figures; a white-haired bear and his red-headed cub. Only, the cub towered over the bear. And the bear was dressed in a union suit.
“That’s Gordie Payne and that’s Mr. Payne’s son, Tiny,” said Ham, dryly. “He’s a cat-skinner, Tiny is. He likes to skin cats. He binds their legs with old stockings and he skins them alive! How do I know this? Why, I’ve come across Tiny’s handiwork.”
“I came across one that wasn’t quite dead yet not a week before you arrived, Eggs. Flipping around on that pretty path we take into town sometimes. Where you lost your wallet last summer? The shortcut? Minding my own business as is my wont. At first, see, I didn’t know what I was hearing. I didn’t know what I was seeing. Looked like the garbage left after a big old chicken dinner, bundled with kite string and just flipping around in the gravel, and the, uh, gravel was sticking to this bloodiness like… all dipped in flies…”
He had to take deep breaths. He looked away and pinched the bridge of his nose. I remember thinking, Why is he pretending to be so upset?
“I wrapped it in my undershirt with a heavy rock and buried the poor thing in Lake Veronica.”
I kept the binoculars steady on Gordie Payne and his son stacking firewood against their homely lakeside digs in a yard with two flag poles stuck in it, frightening with furious expressions at heaving wood. Mr. Payne was beardless Santa in filthy long underwear. His son as tall as Uncle Ham and handsome in a little-eyed way and shirtless with flashing red shoulder-length hair and big muscles. He looked… cool.
“But how do you know it’s Tiny, Uncle Ham? Can you prove it? Did you ever,” I lowered the binoculars and shined a skeptical squint his way, “actually see Tiny skinning one of these cats?”
Ham took the binoculars from me gently. Chuckling. He thought, probably, “I guess we forgot about the essential bisexuality of all ten year old boys” but only allowed himself to say “Oh brother” instead. He handed the binoculars back. “Look there, just behind the woodpile. See the front of a fire-engine-red roadster. Rag top, yes? The Devil’s sport scar. Look.”
I screwed the adjuster on the binoculars and focused on what I could see of the roadster, lacquered and long as a goddess’ fingernail in dynamic repose behind the stack of firewood while Gordie and Tiny shuffle-grunted the foreground with logs.
“The radio antenna,” directed Uncle Ham. “Evil is a form of Stupidity.”
“Holy moly,” I said.
Half a dozen cat tails tied to it.
3. Civilization-Hating Men
We went into town for groceries about once every two weeks. The third time we drove in, Ham had me behind the steering wheel on a bundle of newspapers and him in the back, playing The Chauffeur and The Bigwig and I couldn’t believe how fast the time was escaping us. I’d already been in Lakeville for six weeks. Six weeks to go and then I’d be back with my mother and chinless Shep Olgilvie. Aiming the Nash straight and then holding the wheel in place was easy enough but then trying to turn it to follow the occasional curve was a challenge. We would have had death all over our faces had another car come around one of those curves.
“That’s it,” Uncle Ham kept saying from the back seat, reclined with hands behind his head in a brilliant pantomime of confidence in me, “thatsa boy.” He finally made me stop and change places before the last mile into town. “Or they’ll toss you in jail, Eggs,” he laughed. “Can’t have that, partner.”
That very evening he had me drive us into town again for a movie at the Lakeville Odeon. It was Hitchcock night; three Hitchcock films for one dollar. Vertigo; The Birds; Psycho. Uncle Ham was only interested in seeing The Birds. I sat through the first and third films alone. Uncle Ham had originally suggested that I drive back from the last movie by myself in the Nash in the dark but I chickened out and he did not press me. To this day I feel that I let him down on that.
“The most brilliantly misogynistic rant of a film ever made, Eggs. Saint Paul himself couldn’t have done better.”
I nodded.
“Do you know what ‘misogynistic’ means?” Crossing the gravel behind the Odeon for the Nash. “Woman-hating. Don’t forget that Alfred Hitchcock was English and that ‘bird’ is a slang term for women over yonder.”
He silenced the gravel by stopping us suddenly and spoke with both hands on my shoulders and the moon his rusted halo. “There’s something I want you to read, Eggs. I just got it back from the person who… borrowed it.” He turned and continued toward the Nash in the dark and later handed me the book before bedtime.
I’m looking at the book right now, it’s in my lap, a nice edition of Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”. Published in the ‘60s, leather-bound, gold-leafed. I kept it all those years but couldn’t bear to read it and now that I can and do, it makes sense. It makes sense of things that have confused and hurt me for thirty years. Someone died for this book. Someone died and another one faded in his large stone fortress of civilization-hating men.
The title page is inscribed “To Hamilton, in the spirit of Calamus, E.” and under that it says “Everything Matters”. There’s a long lock of hair bookmarking a poem titled “Are You The New Person Drawn Toward Me?” and it is red.
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CONFIDENCE
About a week after I went blind, my friend Dorman dropped me off on a bench in Roosevelt Park, just exactly as he’d done the day before, so I could sun myself for three hours until the end of his shift. It was Thursday. Dorman said, “Now don’t you go anywhere until I get back, you impetuous kid,” and patted me on the head. He crushed the sharp grass with his boots as he climbed the slope to the sidewalk that ringed the park.
“What am I looking at?” I called over my shoulder. I could just feel him standing there with his hands in his pockets, peering at the back of a blind head. The cigarette batting up and down in the corner of his mouth as he spoke. “Some gay guys playing volleyball. Asian yuppie trying to teach a bulldog to sit.”
I was partial to Roosevelt Park in part because of the courthouse bell tower looming over the park’s western corner and just as Dorman opened his mouth and said, “Well, adios,” the bell began bonging. It was two o’clock. By the time the bells were silent Dorman was gone, scrunched back down into his crappy little diesel-burning car with a plan to return at shift’s end.
I’d never truly appreciated the totality of the experience of sitting in sunlight on a late-spring day before the blindness. Less and less did I think of light as light and more and more as heat; I thought of it also as pressure and I knew that if the blindness kept up long enough the time would come when I could smell it and taste it too. I’d sniff the gray of an overcast day and the last gasp of twilight would reek achy blue. I sat there in my sunglasses, arms folded over my chest, face tilted towards the hum of that perilously huge and proximate star, inhaling it. I repositioned my head in one way or another, pretending to be watching things.
The sun felt so good. I could feel the smack of red palms on dirty white volleyball flesh, the green grunt (in a bouquet of gasps) preceding the smack each time and the grass-ripping skirmish of earthfall, then pell-mells of yelps in pursuit of the ball to the opposite side of the net. And I could hear, at a forty-five degree angle to my right, at a distance of maybe thirty yards, metered out in human barks: “Sit.”
“Sit.”
“Sit.”
And I’m sure I could tell from the timbre of his voice, with liberal horror, that the person speaking was Asian. Dorman had told me as much; “Asian yuppie trying to teach a bulldog to sit.” So it’s possible that I’d colored the sound of his voice with the taint of prior knowledge. But he did. He sounded Asian. In the same way that every Public Service Announcement that I have ever heard on the radio in which a solemn majestic voice with a hint of high rasp in it has asked me not to litter or has asked me to give or has reminded me to remember Earth Day was a Native American voice and I didn’t have to be told that. Do I have to be told when an operator at the other end of a 411 call is black? So can’t I likewise detect the special quality of an Asian voice? Is it more racist to say that most Asians have a certain quality of voice than it is to say that most Asians have straight black hair?
Once every twenty minutes or so there came the cavernous flush of the public toilet behind and to the left, up the slope, beside the sidewalk. I could taste it, too, that deli tang of piss. There’s the brownorange of saturated vintage and the greeny-yellow of the day’s fresh pressed. Men like to piss outside the toilet bunker too, of course, much like those who helpfully toss their trash near a litter basket and the odor from such deposits has the sharpness of thumbtacks.
Holding my arm, Dorman had shepherded me to the toilet for one last drain of the bladder before he could take me down to the bench and park me here for three serenely helpless hours. Some lug was planted like a marksman at a stall already as Dorman and I had entered, arms linked, and I could feel the lug’s neck bones crack at us as his shoeleather flexed in the twist of his weightshift and his subsequent homophobe’s sniff and exit. Dorman tensed defensively but being blind I was far beyond embarrassment. Safe in my pod.
I had gone blind on a Friday. During the early hours. I wonder if a certain dream caused it. I sprawled there in bed for the longest time with a menacing sense of un-rightness. It was as dark in that room as I had ever seen on Earth but the noise that blew in on a temperate breeze through the window above the bed was the bright hustle and quarrel and stutter and screech of a wide-awake beast called a city.
“Sit.”
That bulldog was having a hard time paying attention to his master’s command to sit. Was it just not sitting at all, the bulldog, or sitting and standing again too quickly to constitute a proper sit? Was the guy pushing the dog’s flatulent rump down with every command? Was it a comically disobedient dog, with floppy jowls, peering up cutely from under a droopy brow? Or was it a bad seed, this dog? Destined to disappoint?
A funny effect of the blindness, which became evident after the initial panic subsided, after the first screaming-into-a-pillow day was out of my system, was the sexiness of it. I’d noticed a similar syndrome while traveling. I’d come into a new city, unpack a suitcase in a hotel room and develop a boner, an erection of adolescent persistence. Probably the possibilities implied by a maid-fingered bed in a virgin space, the thrill of knowing that anything can happen in a strange room simply because nothing had not happened there yet. And so it was in the Black Hotel Room of my blindness, my Pod; a state of constant arousal. I would crawl to the bathroom and finger the walls and fixtures until I oriented myself to face the blank mirror and milk the stiff udder of my imagination into the facebowl two or three times a day. After the act, I’d pull the silver knob that stoppers the sink, run the warm water and sluice them towards the pipe-encased sea of the city, my wiggling little atoms of need.
“How old is he?” I called out, boldly, wondering exactly how long I might fool somebody into thinking I could see. I tried to call out at a directed volume that might sound like I was aiming at him. Too loud would be a dead giveaway.
“It’s a she not a he. Five months. Stella.”
“Beautiful dog,” I said, nodding. I knew he was probably petting her, scratching behind her ears with pride. And the dog’s tongue was hanging out the corner of its messy mouth, ladling slobber on the grass.
“Bulldog, right?”
He didn’t answer; had I offended him? but then it dawned on me that the owner was grinning and nodding. Then the silence stretched out until the bell tower bonged three and I realized that the Yuppie and his bulldog had gone, of course. Yuppies become uncomfortable after three or four minute exchanges. They’re ideally suited for elevator quipping in buildings of ten stories or less, or in line at a very fast bagel or coffee shop. Then it occurred to me that he’d probably seen Dorman lead me to the bench and sit me there, an ambulatory invalid, and it was clear to him that I was blind and I had looked to him as either pathetic or insane for pretending that I could see. He had crept off, embarrassed for me.
The volleyball game raged on. I could hear, in the out-of-breathness of some of the game’s participants as they shouted out scores, or good-natured taunts against the other side, that some of the players were a bit older than others, or at least in worse shape and were playing the game on a different level altogether. The young ones were just batting a ball around in the sunshine; the old ones were involved in a life-and-death struggle. The exuberant selfishness of beautiful youth, never looking at anything other than itself in any real detail, helped the old ones camouflage the terror in their efforts. I got caught up in it, hearing it that way, and noticed that the weak, the sick, the old, were the ones making all the noise. Gasping jokes. Desperate screams with the winning points. Then I smelled coffee.
My bench jolted and creaked with slender company.
“Hi.”
“Hi,” I said, smiling in the direction that the “Hi” had come from. A female “Hi”. A throaty, sexy, televisiony “Hi”. The kind of “Hi” that sounds like it knows full well it’s welcome, barging benevolently into your living room at primetime to sell you some kind of frozen gourmet dinner, or to warn you about the dangers of pre-natal smoking. Hi, I’m Lauren Hutton.
I cocked my head. “Actress?”
She hesitated before responding and I knew she was examining me with a skeptical squint.
“But you’re blind aren’t you?” she said. I reached out for her and we both laughed. She apologized. “I’ll bet that’s the bluntest anybody’s been all day.” She touched my shoulder while chuckling and I felt like a tuning fork being pinged. “Isn’t it?”
“Surely.” I pulled off my sunglasses and gave her a quick un-look and winked and slipped them back on with both hands. “Not just blind, I’ll have you know. Nouveau blind. Blind for six days, thus far, but who’s counting? Sitting here trying to pass myself off as a guy with eyes.” I saluted her. “I’m still in the closet. How’d you ‘out’ me?”
“I live in those apartments…” she caught herself, “I live in a high-rise overlooking the park. I sit on my balcony doing crossword puzzles and drinking coffee in the afternoon. This is the second day I’ve seen your friend walk you over to this bench. I like the way you dress…you look kinda displaced. Your friend isn’t bad looking himself. He drives a Skoda, by the way. Vanity plates. ‘2 BAD 4 U’. Oh dear.”
I enjoyed a very clear image of her on her balcony, peering through the eyepiece of one of those expensive little telescopes that were so popular among the hip last year. Lauren Hutton with a telescope. Then I had a disappointing intuition. “You’re not about to ask me if my friend is married, are you?”
“Me? Heavens no. I don’t date smokers, or Skoda drivers, or guys with vanity plates, for that matter. Your friend looks too much like a writer. I have to admit I like the sideburns, though.”
“Sideburns?” Mock outrage. “He’s grown sideburns in the week of my tragic blindness?” Dorman had been talking about doing that for years, growing sideburns, but I always gave him shit about the notion. “I must say he’s made the most of my handicap.” I shook my head. “The Skoda he bought in East Berlin and shipping it cost more than the car is even worth, but his theory is that the kind of girl he likes likes funky little cars like that, so… ”
“Whatever works. Beats swimming upstream for a little salmon, wouldn’t you agree?”
“How do you feel about painters?”
“Painters.” I could feel her frowning. “You were a painter?”
“Were? Am.“ One smart nod. “You have admit it’s one helluva gimmick. Arrange the tubes a certain way, work with a limited pallet, I could even do you.” I leaned towards her. “By touch.” I reached but she pulled her face out of range.
“Sorry,” she said.
“No, no… ” Hot faced. “You… ”
“But you honestly don’t understand.”
A very long minute elapsed. I could feel traffic and the dramatic slaps and yelps of the volley-ball siege and her ladylike coffee-sipping. I could feel inland-wandering gulls pleading for life in a chain of circles across the sky. I heard a tree-shadow encroach on my left as the sun rolled right. I shrugged and smiled that ever-upwards smile of the blind and said, “Spring.”
She made the muffled interrogatory mmmm? of someone busy with coffee. I cleared my throat. “This is the first Spring I’ve ever felt a part of. I can no longer see it, but I smell it and hear it… I am it. Like eyes are these holes in your head you’re always escaping out of. Now that I can’t get out anymore, I’m here… I’m present. Responsible for my atoms. ” I think I was smirking. It’s hard to feel, from the inside out, the difference between a smirk and some rue. In any case, I was thinking that she was obviously an old hand at diverting attention. Ask her a question about herself and the next thing you knew, you were talking about you.
“So, uh, you still haven’t answered my question.”
“Which question was that, sweetie?”
“Your voice. It sounds so… I don’t know… so polished. Well-modulated.”
“Am I an actress?” Meaningful chuckle. Irony there. “You’re hearing the Finishing School, probably. You’re hearing some debutante shellack. I’m no actress. If I were an actress, I could only get certain parts, anyway. Well, not even then. Along those lines, there’s something I should probably tell you… ”
I had another disappointing intuition. The voice was so deep. Deeper than Lauren Hutton’s.
“I love this coffee. Persian Mocha Royale. Wanna sip?” She carefully steadied the heavy mug in my hands and as I lowered my upper lip to the hot edge of the coffee she said, like there was poison in the drink, “Wait.”
“You’re a man,” I blurted.
“That’s right,” she said, with what sounded like real pleasure, “you wouldn’t even be able to tell, would you? Well, happy to say, no. But,” she took a deep breath, “when I was younger, very much younger than I am today, ten years ago or so, there was an accident, yes? and I’d really rather not go into in any detail now, but I had to have some pretty extensive skin-grafts… my face, my chest, my right arm… the doctors were very expensive and very very good… but, uh, what can I say? I’m no longer what you’d call a pretty sight. I have a good body, knock on wood (she knocked on the bench) and I haven’t been a shut-in or anything and I’ve had more than my share of drug-induced one-night stands, because, as you may know, men will sleep with just about anything…but, uh, you know, nobody’s ever walked proudly down the street holding hands with me on a Sunday afternoon in Soho, if you know what I mean? People stare; the very old are as bad as children. Yuppies try so hard not to stare that it’s the same difference. Oh, plus: I get these resentful looks on the rare occasions when I decide that I’m human and want to dine in a nice restaurant… I guess it puts some people off their food. You know, it’s like: doesn’t she have the common decency to stay home?”
She shifted on the bench, getting a leg up on it, hugging a knee to her chest. I think. She said:
“God…”
“You can’t believe you just told me that,” we overlapped, in near-unison, laughing. She touched my shoulder again. Again I pinged.
“I just wanted to get that out of the way.” From the inclination of her voice I could tell she was staring out across the park, away from me, remembering things. I wanted her very badly. “I mean, I suppose I could have kept it a secret and you never would have known. Until you touched my face.”
I was so glad I couldn’t see her. I found myself almost desperate that she’d stay. I experienced the astounding luxury of not giving a damn how she looked.
“Well, since you’ve already mentioned the unmentionable, how old are you? If I may be so rude.”
“Prefer not to say,” she said as pleasantly as possible.
“Ah. Mysterious older woman?”
“Not really. And there’s nothing mysterious about any woman over thirty,” she huffed. “That’s just a phony consolation prize men give you for your wrinkles… ‘worldly’ ‘mysterious’… only teenage girls have any mystery about them and that’s only because they’re mysterious to themselves.” She sniffed. Sipped some coffee. Crossed a leg. I’d touched a nerve.
“What’s your favorite period of Picasso?”
She took long enough to answer that I realized (and I realized that she realized as well) that it wasn’t really just an innocent question on my part. It was a test. Anyone who answered “The Blue Period” failed. I could be friends with someone who answered “Cubism”, but never sleep with them. I was hoping she’d answer correctly, because I really, and not simply out of base biological need, wanted to sleep with her. In a very noisy way.
When I could see, I cared so much more about how I looked and the woman in your life is definitely an extension of your own appearance. Would she, my deformed beauty with the luxurious voice, be the first in a long line of exquisite monsters?
“My favorite period of Picasso.” She sucked a lip. “Well, the last one. Just before he died. When he was painting like a death-obsessed child.” She tapped my knee. “When he was painting those monsters.”
I got chills.
“Do you wanna know the weirdest thing about my current condition?” I could smell her dry saliva on the lip of the coffee mug. She wasn’t wearing lipstick. She scooted closer. This poor ugly lonely girl. How ugly? She smelled like Persian Mocha Royale and herbal shampoo and something else, something nearly-forgotten and I really wanted to eat her. Lick and chew that ugly face. Oysters are ugly too and don’t I love them?
“The weirdest thing about being blind,” I said, as I tapped my nose, “Is that I feel indestructible. I feel immortal. Back before, when I could see, I felt as flimsy as a fruit fly. Now I feel, I don’t know, like I’m in this very safe place, this kryptonite vault in space. I call it The Pod. I feel like my ties to this tiny world have been severed. I’m only still participating in the banality of everyday life because why not? But in reality, see, I’m flying through space in The Pod. Immortal and unbound. Cozy in the black-box recorder of the jet plane of existence or something.”
I was selling her on blindness, you see. I was offering it to her, to share it somehow, in order to keep her with me. She touched me through my light jacket and her touch left sweet burns of sex on my arm. She kissed me twice, first on the side of my face and then, giving into the impulse, she suddenly took my blindness in her hands and kissed me hard on the mouth.
“I’ll keep in touch,” she said, and she was gone.
I was so stunned that I couldn’t even say goodbye. I had a sad premonition of coming back to this park, this bench, at the same time every day, for years of hoping. Tilting my face towards her balcony. Wherever it was.
“Hey,” someone called. I cocked my head.
“Are you alright?” The panting of the dog at his feet. “She sure can spin a tale, can’t she? That sister can talk,” he chuckled. He patted Stella the mildly disobedient Bulldog. Or maybe he was scratching her belly. “But you’re fine, I see.”
He settled on the bench.
“Gary Chew,” he said. “She smells good for a homeless, too. I’ll give her that. See, I used to give her money when I first moved here. I look like an easy mark, I admit it! She’d cook up these real elaborate sob stories and it was kinda funny because she never seemed to remember me and came up with a different story every time. But I always gave her a buck anyway. Then one day I saw her approach a brother, you know, a black guy, in a business suit, a successful brother with a real air about him and he just shook his head and kinda straight-armed right past her and I thought, damn! If her own people won’t help her, why should I?”
The Asian slapped his leg and Stella jumped with great effort upon the bench between us and her master rubbed her vigorously as he spoke.
“You a dog lover?”
I felt sick.
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Sylvie: A Nanonovel in 6 Chaptagraphs
Chapter One: More than Words
Sylvie’s father was a writer whose time had come and gone, but he was fine with that. He’d invested the windfall with prescience. He had a house in a decent neighborhood in a city that scored with consistent impressiveness on all the quality-of-life surveys worth checking, along with some property a two hours’ drive up north. The property up north featured a rustic cabin he was going to write his comeback in, a cabin near a well he wasn’t allowed to drink out of, overlooked by the aerie of an endangered species of hawk he could do up to ten years in prison for harassing or killing. The working title of the book was More Than Words. The rest of the book would come to him in the cabin. Usually he’d creep around the immaculately decorated house long after Sylvie had gone to bed, stewarding wineglasses and adjusting picture frames, soothed by the hum of the climate control, which made the house feel like an airship in flight over the continent. Sometimes he’d rescue a volume, or two, belonging to one of the sets of collected encyclopediae, open on its face on a settee in the media room, and shepherd it, humming, back up the three polished steps into the tracklit library, pushing against a satisfying resistance the thing into its proper slot. Tonight he just stood by Sylvie’s bedroom door, listening.
Chapter Two: A Perfectly-Judged Death-while-Sailing
Sylvie’s mother had come from a large, self-consciously colorful family that only tolerated exogamy, apparently, because exogamy’s extremest opposite was frowned on by The State. There were the four charismatic brothers who had always looked like men; an eldest sister of chilling beauty, with her infallible eye for long scarves (with their tragic associations) and a father who would have to die before Sylvie’s future mother finally moved out of the house she was born in, a recently painted Georgian mansion with pillars on its porches and Amish hex signs carved in its gable shutters, mocked on all sides by encroaching slum. Sylvie’s mother was the baby of the family and had effectively fended off Sylvie’s claim on the title. Driving by that house, recently, Sylvie’s father felt oddly vindicated by the graffiti all over its pillars and even slowed down in an ill-advised attempt to read some of it, stepping on the accelerator when the first stones ponked at the trunk. Girls who hate their fathers are not, as Sylvie’s father had discovered, the worst, if you aren’t the father. All three sisters, Sylvie’s future mother and the other two; the polyglot and the choreographer; had gotten pregnant within six months of the old man’s perfectly-judged death-while-sailing, and he wondered if there hadn’t been a subconscious race to produce a vessel for the old man’s anticipated return. Sylvie’s future father had first noticed Sylvie’s future mother not for her spectacular pre-Raphaelite hair, but for her terminal t’s, which she tended to over-articulate. Didn’t you want that with some fruit bits?- was the last sentence she’d spoken to him before he finally confessed, waving away the dry mangoes that always put him in mind of floor scraps from a bris, that he wanted her to move out. He hadn’t put it exactly that way. He’d offered to move out and she’d demurred as predicted. She’d joked about Arabs being able to divorce their wives by repeating a certain word three times but couldn’t remember the word and he’d said but we’re not really married and she’d stood suddenly and swept breakfast off the table, very much the prodigy losing a game against someone avowedly casual towards chess. She remembered the word was talaq. He said talaq, talaq, talaq, waving a finger like a wand, both of them laughing. To be honest, she was relieved. She’d said, We’ll let Sylvie decide who she wants to live with; that’s the only civilized thing to do, and Sylvie had chosen him, as predicted. Sylvie’s father and Sylvie’s mother continued sleeping together for quite some time until the night Sylvie’s mother never came home, which soon became the week she never came home.
Chapter Three: Cancer Gets the Girl
He imagined her seeing the country on a wasp-sleek Japanese motorcycle. He reminisced on how they’d met. They’d met in a self-defense class. She was there, looking barefoot and good, in what she called her Chinese pyjamas, because of encroaching slum, while he was there to meet a girl. Or girls. The solidarity of self-declared prey, as his best friend, whose idea it had been to go, had put it. This friend had dozens of good ideas on how to meet girls and yet never met any. From as far back as Sylvie’s future father could remember knowing this friend, this friend had talked like a well-informed cancer patient, with an ease in jargon and the cadences down and really good at reeling off technical specifications, probabilities, outlooks on graded contingencies with this clipped, confident, guardedly optimistic voice. And then he got cancer, causing no break or modulation in the flow of the way he communicated. He found the personality tic of his preferred mode of expression astonishingly well-suited to the circumstance. It’s as though he hit the ground running as far as cancer was concerned, was how Sylvie’s future father had put it to Sylvie’s future mother over a milkshake (this was before the days of fashionable young people drinking recreational coffee) after class. Should he feel guilty? Was the irony a bear, or a bluebird? He’d used his friend’s cancer to get a girl.
Chapter Four: Dreadlock Combover
Before Sylvie’s future father and her future mother got serious about each another, Sylvie’s future father wavered in his intentions towards another, slightly older, woman. Older, but in no way inferior, except, perhaps, in age. The woman was cultured and fine and dressed well in a manner that showed off her jaw, an angular marvel reminiscent of the jaw on the actress Jodie Foster, who was then still young. Whether she wore a ruffled collar, a turtleneck or a collarless t-shirt borrowed from her son, the jaw stood out with its sharp origami folds. He was enamored of this woman and had slept with her several times with memorable results and poetry and expensive baseball-sized sourdough blueberry muffins from her bottomless pantry as rewards. The day before Thanksgiving they attended an avant garde opera in a ceremonial gesture towards the deepening cultural seriousness of both that region of the country and their relationship, standing by coincidence behind her ex-boyfriend in the white-wine-line during intermission. The ex was a balding soi-disant (pre-Internet) tech-whiz with blond dreadlocks leftswept over his pink pate like fraying ropes on a castaway ham. Fairly or not, she became repulsive to Sylvie’s future father in her ex-boyfriend’s reflected aura, but there was still an hour of grindingly self-serious and overlit opera to sit through. The weightless warm hand that sought its habitual place on his thigh when the opera commenced found only tensed muscle to rest on. The hand knew before the rest of her body. Sylvie’s future father reflected self-pityingly on an inner recitation of the oral history of his failed romances while two local characters (descendants both of auto workers) in Bauhaus-ish costumes of vaguely animal abstraction cavorted on a minimalist stage, realizing in a panic that the time he lost to the experience would never come refunded, and the woman he decided he loved was elsewhere.
Chapter Five: Ich mag sie nicht in einem Haus / Ich mag sie nicht mit einer Maus
Sylvie’s future father hurried over to Sylvie’s future mother’s house right after the opera, unmindful of the fact that he walked unarmed through encroaching slum. He found himself not only thinking of, but looking at, really looking at, more than one black-or-Afro-American-Negro-of-color at a time, for the first time in his life. He’d never admit this to anyone; not even to a friend with cancer; but the first thing that struck him was the variety. Not only in tint but in weight, gait, hair texture, posture, girth, aura, odor, manner of dress, scale of possible threat (from benign to sinister), range of facial features and sexual attractiveness. Some of the toughest boys were pretty as girls in their white t-shirts and tight jeans. Some of the prettiest women exerted the narcotic allure of the scent of the motherland, smouldering after a bushfire, and he locked eyes with more than one, with their coal-smooth breasts, before being ejected, further in his way down the road, each time, by a playfully dismissive smile. Sylvie’s future mother was on the front porch of the white island of the mansion, drying her gaze-stuffing pre-Raphaelite hair with a shrieking dryer at the end of a chain of three extension cords. Sylvie’s future father tried breathlessly to speak, sucking every other word back in, over the anti-siren song of the dryer. He told Sylvie’s future mother half the truth, which was twice the lie: that he’d suddenly realized that he loved her in the middle of an opera. She asked which opera. She laughed, or, being from a family of high-culture insiders, tittered, and explained. To his initial bafflement, which matured to a rage which hardened into a manifesto, he learned that the libretto of the work he’d squirmed through po-faced for two hours (the second half of which was twice as long as the first) was taken from Doctor Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham. In German. That’s the problem with postmodern so-called Art, he sorrowed. The joke is always on us.
Chapter Six: He decided to write a Book that Everyone could Understand
He decided to write a book that everyone could understand.
AH, THE PLEASURES OF RATIONAL SPEECH
Still so terribly/wonderfully/sleep-deprivedly busy working on Beloved’s Show, but let’s watch an hour-long video of charmingly intelligent Michael Parenti untie several psycho-politico knots for us…
Parenti at 16:00: the fundamental (and self-aggrandizing) Leftist error of giving the Right’s crafty “Incompetency” alibi a pass
at 27:00: how the Left has been gamed into accepting the Right-imposed parameters of “acceptable” discourse
at 33:00: the double-standard in using the term “Conspiracy”
47:00: the cool shit
TERMINATOR 28
I smell After Effects CS5…
CLICK ME
http://www.pornolize.com/translate/?lang=en&url=http://staugustine2.wordpress.com/
Never mind all that…here’s some important stuff: previously unseen pix of Julie Newmar! I felt sure you’d want to know.
Now, if only that legendary Mary Tyler Moore porno flick would surface…
what a great time that was to have one’s libido installed, eh, M?
For men most certainly Steven but judging by the bloke in the picture the gals may have had to search ( or is that lurch? ) a bit longer and deeper for libido-arousing males.
Please put a warning on that one Steven.
I’m not so rigidly hetero that I’m squeamish about the male body but the above nude singer-songwriter ( redolent perhaps of John Denver in his psycho-let’s-carve-up-the-wooden-chalet phase ) nearly made me regurgitate my shreddies and sultana breakfast ( we’ve been on tour so the larder is somewhat eccentrically stocked to say the least ).
WHATTAFABFUCKIN SITE
Whalley Range where I used to live had an impressive population of social misfits and outsiders. One of the most extraordinary was a sikh who walked along having long, involved conversations with himself in two completely different voices. One was very similar to the first Tourette girl in the vid-clip.
If you walked behind him and closed your eyes you’d swear ( I feel duty bound to not correct the use of the word and emphasise the unconscious joke here ) there were two people. If you managed not to walk into a lampost whilst walking with your eyes closed that is ( always a hazard for those who imagine too much ).
Sure he wasn’t rehearsing for BGT, Comrade DJ Sensei ET? Returning to the above-posted video, I’m wondering how many of us can claim the parental mettle/Ninja skills required to go for a day of shopping in London with a Tourettesy-teen liable to shout “nigger!” in a sinister voice at the worst possible moment? Hats off to that mom (unless she’s with the BNP, of course)…
And how about this headline…?
Remember when it was the other way around? Intercourse was a given (if you didn’t slip off the car seat on a puddle of spermicide, or the diaphragm, first) but oral was something you got if you were engaged or in a band. And anal… only if you were in the Boyscouts! (rim shot)
I have that crucial extra thirty minutes to post on TET tonight because Beloved performed her first gig of the new show I’m writing for her…. and I’m taking a break until rehearsals resume in a few days! As you know, being involved in a publicly-performed Art is so much less musty/taxing than writing prose and chatting (and/or flaming) about it. I compose a piece of music, rehearse it with Beloved and her musical outfit, they perform it, people in formal-wear applaud… wonderful.
However: your mention of White Noise (end of previous thread) inspired me to nominate it as the week’s U-Bahn book (never ride the Underground in Berlin without a book to hide behind). Very funny stuff in there I’d forgotten about… but there’s also the occasional sensation that Don parodies his trademark gnomic bathos… every now-and-then, a sentence much cuter or cooler than is really necessary pops up, when something a little grayer would have offset the adjacent splendors better. Minor gripe, in any case. The point of this digression being that a few days ago I had White Noise as a sidearm on the way to my lunch with Comrade DJ Sensei JR. We were having a falafel feast at picnic-style seating in the trendy-gritty borough of Kreuzberg (“Xberg” if you’re a hipster), munching, chatting, watching traffic in the not-too-chilly shadow of the falafel shop. An earthy-looking guy in a leaf-raking jacket and a watchman’s cap lurched into view to our right, high-fived Comrade JR and pointed as if he knew me and said, with his German accent, “Son of a gun!”
Lots of Germans learn their English from 60-year-old textbooks (the high-fiving they learn from 30-year-old Television shows), so I thought nothing of it. He spotted my copy of White Noise next to my plate of falafel and told me that a movie of his was mentioned in another book by Don (“The one about terrorism”… any DeLillo fan will laugh at that description) and so he’d written Don a letter. It suddenly worried me that my lunch was cooling just so I could listen to a mildly batshit guy say bullshit. I put some falafel on a fork and told him (facetiously, mind) that I’d love to get a look at Don’s response but he shrugged and said that Don had never answered. So the guy isn’t crazy after all, I concluded… just kind of sad. But he was cheerful when he said his goodbye and disappeared around the corner.
“I bet you barely recognized him,” said Comrade JR.
“Barely? Not at all.” (Said he, with his mouth full)
Comrade JR reminded me that I’d met that man about 15 years ago… and then it hit me who it was and that I’d casually described, to him, that day (four or five of us were eating pizza), the plot points of a comedy script I was working on: Son of a Gun. It all fell into place. I’d just been talking to one of Germany’s most famous and successful film directors, while my falafel cooled. And I’ve been sifting through “Falling Man”, looking for a reference to any film of his, for fucking days now…
Here are a couple of pix from Beloved’s gig tonight (featuring our suave Chilean axe man; also note sinister head of a plutocrat hovering over the instrument in pic 1):
I thought the business man’s head was part of the decoration.
When I lived in London I used to occasionally get work shifting pianos. I still have muscle memories of trying to move an upright covered in baroque carvings. Jeezis. We had to lift it over a kitchen bar that seperated two rooms. I wouldn’t recommend it unless you really want to get in touch with the middle bit of your spine and discover what muscle sub-groupings you don’t have.
Mind you it was as nothing when compared to trying to move a mellotron. It took about 5 of us to get it onto a trolley so it could be moved.
I hope you didn’t write a mellotron into your partner’s set and I hope the set went well.
I thought White Noise had some virtuosic pieces of writing – especially the bit at the end where the toddler breaks free on his bike. But it’s the rhythm that impressed for me – breathtaking but never too fast that you stop weighing it all up.
“The bit at the end” – I’m fluent in lit-crit speak aren’t I?
“I thought the business man’s head was part of the harp decoration…”
I just checked on the harp and, weirdly enough, the plutocrat’s head carving is a feature. How I never noticed that before I can’t quite figure.
Mellotrons! I (and Rick Wakeman) love mellotrons! Luckily, these days, they’ve got a silicon chip called “mellotron” and it weighs about a tenth of a gram so don’t say there isn’t progress.
Re: White Noise: full of brilliant shit (please don’t think my litcrit-speak pretentious)
No doubt there’s a silicon chip which renders today’s samplers heavier for the benefit of nostalgic roadies who “need to lug”.
Underworld next – availability in Manchester bookshop en route to London depending.
[ed.'s note: if you can't find a copy I'll snail-mail you one, Comrade DJ Sensei ET! And PS: incorporating, those paintings you sent, in a film, is still on the To-Do list! Operating on a geologic timescale over here... only the biological process of aging is reassuringly up to speed and on-track...]
The performance that the paintings you put up on TET ( 6.0 was it?) were for looks likely to happen in 2011. I have a meeting with a few festivals next week which should confirm all the money needed to make the show is there.
We pitched the idea more in bloody-mindedness ( this is what we want to do – take it or leave it ) more than in pragmatism. So sometimes it works.
By the end of the week the lapsang souchong should be flowing chez nous.
Thanks for the offer of the book but on my last visit to the relevant bookshop Underworld was there ( money in my wallet wasn’t so I chose White Noise instead ) so unless there’s been a “Celebration of De Lillo week with 80% off all his books” in the meantime it’s likely to still be there.
I discovered a batch of flick books I made to accompany a show we did in 2000. If you email me your postal address I’ll send one over to you.
[you'll have my snail-mail coordinates by the end of the day, ET... will be busy cleaning up a toxic Arts-n-Crafts mess with Offsprung until then]
[PS: click the link at Comment#3 to discover your porn name]
The Master
The Clown
Have been in London town last few days and having to wait for my host to get back from work I saw “The Social Network” at the flicks . It’s about the guy who set up Facebook. A watchable film but interesting because it intentionally showed characters who were emotionally numb and morally blank without the usual let-out clauses that Hollywood actors usually demand if they are going to play unsympathetic people. Or if there were let-out clauses they were buried very deep. Or I am too old to be the film’s demographic and what passes for repulsive for me is seen as cool by the young.
Anyway Koons reminds me of that film. He’s like a packaged version of Warhol. If objects of a terrifying banality can be art than Koons is art I suppose. I saw an exhibition of those scaled-up Bavarian-style woodcarvings ( done I expect by the same sculptors whose work he is critiwquing – will these mirrors never stop appearing? ). Looking at them was like staring into something irredeemably stupid – more so than the originals because they are put in high class galleries and have a certain status placed on them.
“Or I am too old to be the film’s demographic and what passes for repulsive for me is seen as cool by the young.”
I’m afraid it might be the latter, Comrade. Go watch “SAW lll” and post your review here and we’ll know for sure….
“Looking at them was like staring into something irredeemably stupid…”
Exactly. And that’s what the Museum/Gallery Catalogs, and ArtZineTexts, are for, with so much Aht these days… the packet of granulated intelligence you can add to the product after the fact (if you want).
The print ads for SAW 111 told me all I needed to know.
Proves his age in one sentences, retires to the kitchen and makes a nice cup of tea.
The Phenomenology of NDG vs Elizabeth Smart
This is the essential grandiosity of all religious thinking. The actions of this rape lunatic have crossed social and legal lines but his views of the world and the universe are well within the range of Normalized Delusional Grandiosity (NDG) which Jews, Christians, Muslims, Mormons, Witches and Scientologists offer their believers. We are nothing more than a part of the variegated blob of organic material on the planet earth. Compared to some bits of the blob, we are slightly fancy. We are even fancy enough, on the infinitesimal scale of local existence, to make the planet stink if we really, really work at it. But nothing we will do can make the universe “notice” us; human growth is not on the universe’s agenda; the universe is not a machine designed to respond to human thought. The earth is a speck. Even our solar system is a speck.
Won’t cheeseburgers taste as good or sex feel as great and love or art inspire us as much… if we face the facts? We’re of no particular importance. Except to each other. Why not focus on that and learn to be kind in the time accidentally allotted?
AMERICAN SCHIZOCRITES
Civil, articulate, rational and well-educated Black American males are mocked, taunted, disdained and sometimes physically assaulted by Black and White alike. Disparaged as false, mask-wearing, deracinated and effeminate, they’re openly pitied as self-hating race-traitors. For every intellectually authoritative, non-clownish, non-effeminate Black Male who somehow manages to sneak an appearance on mainstream media, there are at least 10,000 animalistic, ignorant, menacing athletes, rappers, comedians and actors paid vast sums to act out the ugliest antebellum stereotypes of the Mandingo Unleashed. The 10,000 manufactured Black savages are held up as role-models for Black Male children; the non-effeminate, non-clownish Black Intellectual is not.
Then the New York Times publishes the following, while pretending to scratch its head, alarmed and perplexed:
Well fancy fucking that!
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/09/education/09gap.html
EXPOSING THE AUTHORITY TRAP: A Citizen Philosopher Effectively Refutes Slavoj Zizek from a Comment Thread (and you never even noticed)
The Philosophical Superstar often writes on topical subjects into which he has very little real (or original) insight, but his “authority” is the perfect cover, and the sugar-coating, on erroneous performances. Two texts are here juxtaposed: the first is professional, high-profile and considered worthy of contemplation; the second is a blog comment. The first text is horseshit, the second is illuminating. Let this be a warning.
(To deal with Zizek specifically, though Zizek is not, necessarily, the point of this post: is Zizek merely wrong here or strategically so? Did he generate the erroneous performance knowing that “pessimistic” texts from Left-leaning intellectuals don’t make money? Or is this just a matter of the Fancy Explainer, as anointed authority, giving in to the pressure to respond to every popular moment? Last question: is the “Authority” valued, by the Control and the Audience alike, for precisely what He or She won’t say?)
then:
SO, IN c. 2030 WE CAN DISCUSS JFK and in 2070, WE CAN DISCUSS 2001?
ie
A Few Hundred “Paranoid” “Conspiracy Theorists” Will Be Getting Oral Tonight (and a few converts)
[one imagines there was pressure, from NAZA... oooops... NASA, not to mention Herr von Braun, in this article]
THIS IS HOW FUCKING DUMB THEY THINK YOU ARE*
“Germany Copes With Terror Alert”
The following are statements from an article in the NYT about a “terror threat” in Germany; the statements are arranged in the chronological order in which they appeared in the article. Statement #2, early in the article, explains that a suspected bomb was a “dummy” or fake… but statements that follow that continue to refer to the same “bomb” with the implicit sense that it represented a threat. The only other references to “bomb”-related events (statements #5 and #6) in the article are about false alarms.
In the following excerpt from a local English-based news-source in Germany, there is one under-emphasized statement to the effect that “US or African authorities may have been behind the dummy” device referred to (statement #2) in the article above.
*And the dumber they think you are, the less likely they are to feel the need to actually blow something up to scare you…
UPDATE:
Was going to alert you to a BBC programme about Delia Derbyshire ( possibly gettable on I-player? ) but it was a 10 minute item on a regional round-up ( they are cleaning up tapes of her work at Manchester University ) and it was crap. More about the presenter then DD.
Our sound man who is nerd-like in extremis said that a lot of her stuff which appears to be forward looking was actually made in the 80′s so although good not quite so ground-breaking as it appears. He made a claim for Vera Gray who set up the BBC radiophonic workshop being the true unsung electronic music pioneer.
DD still sounds good is the riposte to that “I’m one step ahead of the pack” nerdery and the Portishead-before-Portishead stuff even if recorded in the 80′s was still 10 years before Portishead.
So forget the Beeb but it looks like a DD archive is going to be put up to download.
Sorry I’ve been so late replying, Comrade DJ Sensei ET, but when things get really busy around here (as they have) the blog is the first thing to go…!
12-8-1980/ 12-8-2010: Because Saints are Notorious for Being Shitty Guitar Players
It’s about that time, again, for the culture which assassinated John Lennon to celebrate his death. A trend I’m picking up, on this 30th anniversary of the successful execution of the plot to smooth the way for the Reagan-Bush Putsch (we’re 30 years into this Reich and counting) is the “John Lennon was no Saint” Op Ed. As if anyone with more than a room-temp IQ thinks that Sainthood is Lennon’s proper selling point. Saints are notorious for being shitty guitar players.
Most of these LENNON NO SAINT texts are written, obviously, by conservative shit-dicks; but some are written by “Liberal” shit-dicks who clearly suffer from the angry guilt of someone who glances in the mirror and resents the shame of what they see and resents, by extension, the standards which shame them… the folk remedy for which, of course, is to “prove” that such standards are humanly unobtainable.
So, if John Lennon was, in fact, just a well-meaning-but-troubled popstar who couldn’t even measure up to his own purported ideals (eg, he wanted “peace” but he got into fistfights)…. the shit-dick feels somewhat absolved for being a craven collaborator in a system that no longer even bothers to pretend to blink at the culturecides and megadeaths it instigates to keep the world safe for i-phones. Not to mention the slow murder, emotional derangement and intellectual enfeeblement of its own citizens in the name of keeping the serfs disorganized and docile.
The truth is that Lennon’s importance rests on his unsurpassedly-rare (for a mega-celebrity) message: DON’T BE FUCKING DUPES. Don’t be duped by popstars. Don’t be duped by religion. Don’t be duped by governments and traditions and advertising and the community consensus.
Lennon also claimed it was immoral to drop bombs on villages but his “Give Peace a Chance” is decidedly not ironic (or evidence of hypocrisy) in light of the fact that he got into fistfights. Now, he’d have been a hypocrite if he’d dropped bombs on villages or machine-gunned women and children in rice paddies or was manufacturing napalm in vats in the attic of the Dakota. But he wasn’t, was he? No he wasn’t.
These LENNON NO SAINT pieces (which tend to scrupulously avoid sourcing the voluminous interview materials, on record, of Lennon espousing an incisive, knowing and extremely useful political philosophy, eg HERE ) are easy enough to avoid. But, owing to the magic of Facebook, I had to read one of the most irritating LENNON NO SAINT remarks, in a Friend’s comment thread, of the season. The commenter wrote:
What a stupid fucking comment… with the added irritant that it was delivered in the simulated tone of fog-cutting frankness. Putting that racist redneck retard, uh-Elvis, on a plane with the guy who wrote “Revolution” and “Woman is the Nigger of the World” and “Across the Universe”…
There is no Facebook App called KICK THAT ASSHOLE’S ASS WITH A POINTED BOOT AND HARD, MAN. I’d have used it. Instead I wrote:
(again; just for fun; he’s talking to a 14-year-old after all)
WIKIDUPES (and I write that as a brief member of that poignant club)
vocabulary words: limited hangout
Your view of Julian Assange will vary according to lifestyle, but what seems remarkably constant, from the Norm Lib devotees of Huff Po to the b.o. cons who chant “Sarah 2012!”, is the assumption that the Wikileak data-dump is a genuine leak of 100% sincere data. Is anything easier to fake than digital docs? A faker doesn’t even need Photoshop skills. I guess it takes an Iranian politician to make the obvious suggestion:
How did I fall for the Assange Phenom for a few weeks, early in the year? It’s very simple (and instructive) and it’s exactly how these things work: because I wanted to. The idea that an articulate, intelligent, cool-bloodedly rational guy with Alt-Look Cred and a seemingly noble cause could seemingly fuck with the Simulocratic Hegemony itself was just too, too attractive. One guy in a new wave suit, kicking a mountain and making a very loud noise. My critical thinking went out the window.
As I wrote here, recently ( and I do like the Dewar’s-sipping Prof, in the vid, who talks like a kid being quizzed by his dad after a naughty escapade with the family station wagon, doing his best to concentrate when so few coherent thoughts seem to want to spring naturally to mind):
Thank Gawd there are a few citizen-philosophers out there who aren’t bathing in bleach-blond Kool Aid this season…
…As ever, some wacky, marginalized, non-accredited, unpaid, anti-MSM bloggers provide the only rational critique of yet another in a long line of headjobs… and isn’t it ironic (sung to the tune of, “Ironic”) that Wiki-lovin’ cyber-rebels are taking the MSM message on this topic at face value while ignoring wacky, marginalized, non-accredited, unpaid, anti-MSM critiques of Julian’s package?
and
http://21stcenturywire.com/2010/12/08/is-wikileaks-a-cointelpro-operation-for-the-establishment/
UPDATE
UPDATE:
Just back from Amsterdam – whilst driving home from the airport ( John Lennon airport natch – nothing stranger to see when waiting for a plane than photos of the Beatles with the Mahareshi Yoga – all of them higher than any plane you’re about to board will ever get ) the car radio played news of leaks where the US diplomats were bitching about Indian government officials. However when these leaks were double checked they weren’t on any of the leaked documents
So it’s make up anything you want, pose as someone who’s read it all, say what you want safe in the knowledge that 98% of journalists aren’t going to bother to trawl through all those pages and it will get on the news.
It’s just open season as to what the leaks might say and it doesn’t even have to be a wikileak it can be any made up thing you want. As long as you look like you know what you are talking about.
Classic Global Headjob, Comrade DJ Sensei ET… it only takes a step back to get a clear overview of the confusion but most of the audience have their noses pressed against the screen with wide eyes blinking
Re: JL Airport: I hear the Chapman lounge is interesting
From the outside the Chapman lounge sounds like it’s a video-game room, however…………
One of those cool “shooter” games, I’m assuming…
The fear is quite tangible and thus ideal for today’s teen for whom video-games are not visceral enough.
Luckily for today’s teens, Comrade ET, the interval of apprenticeship (before game-skills are applied professionally against Third Worlders) is getting shorter all the time
In the UK the armed forces budget is getting hacked back so some of these teens may “have” to become celebrity slayers rather than the harbingers of shock and awe upon shepherds and shop keepers.
They played a few seconds of him on the morning BBC Radio 4 news programme Today. His music shakes up any room it’s played in. An old friend of mine will be very saddened by this news.
But what on earth is the crouched figure in the photo holding? A container for his big-eyed beans from Venus? [ed.'s note: that's either a 1960s-model vacuum cleaner missing its hose or an enlarged titanium vaginophallus]
Somewhere I’m sure I still have a UK hippie/Notting Hill squatter magazine Frenz from the early 70′s with a great interview with him where he carries on his feud with Zappa who was too “sloppy” in his approach to keeping musicians in line. If I still have it and can unearth it I’ll post up some quotes. They were pretty good, he comes across like an avant-garde Patton.
It’s not where I thought it should be so I don’t know where it is.
Tried Googling but the Frendz archive is not extensive.
Lots of Hawkwind, Pink Faeries ( a particular shudder ) and Elton John of all people but no mention of Don Van V.
THE FOUND SACRED XMAS VERSE
Comrade DJ Sensei ET, here’s a seasonal gem for you and all the other Comrades Lurking and Meatspaced (using TET as a trove of arcane knowledge in lieu of daily posts: well done)… a found poem of ludic grace… hold on to your hats so naughty Boreas doesn’t blow them the fuck off while you’re reading this, both soul-and-lip-movingly, to Thineselves:
I think it was wise that Jesus was not to be born in the days of photography
by MOMVERA on some Yahoo thread or other (line breaks by TET)
I think it was wise that Jesus was not to be born in the days of photography
My favorite topic is Jesus Christ. I have an enlarge
photo in my living room some believe is real. It is
for me but maybe not others. It has quite an effect on anyone
who enters our home. No one ever ask who is it is. They just stare.
I think it was wise that Jesus was not to be born in the days
of photography. If you couldn’t identify with him in some way you would miss the reason for the season. I grew up
with the Latin language throughout
my childhood in both public and private schools. One said Christ
was pronounced with a hard C and one said it
was a soft C. He left a lot to ponder. The bones
of John the Baptist, his cousin, were
reportedly found and many churches
have bones of the apostles in their altars. Bones are the human
vault for your DNA and dry hard
bones last thousands of
years. Since we are genetically all over
95% the same and can recreate theoretically
how ancient DNA looked
as a live person, would you recognize John the Baptist?
It is such an exciting world we live in. Jesus left
open the door for us
to realize maybe we are wrong
about how he looked. If he stood in front
of us would we know. From what he taught, he is
in each of us which is the basis
of his religion. Wow, I best not spit
on your window on the world. I might get
a closer look at him than I can handle. But I
will definitely tell you what I see from my
window on the world. He is love for all
to try to grasp better
and better each and every day. I always
tell young people not to be in hurry to grasp
the reality of Jesus for he might figure you
are ready to see him in person. Only old people
should die because they don’t care anymore
what he looks like. They just want to make sure he comes
to get them before they get sent
the wrong way. Learning to love
is learning to live without
human form I do
believe. Like trying to fly
without a body! Ahh,
I need
more time!!!
see here: The People’s Comment Thread Leaves Of Grass
Is the above an am-dram version of Yves Klein’s “Leap into the Void”?
[ed.'s note: Group-discount Midnight Methodist Picnic Leap into the Void, Comrade ET (first photo; last photo is set on the floor of the Romanian parliament)! And a Merry Bearded, Vaguely-Levantine, Anus-Free Sky Giant's Son's Birthday to you, too!]
I wish you seasons greetings, a riotous pagan celebration or a happy crystal meth binge – delete where appropriate.
Last 40 pages of Underworld tonight then it’s lie low until 2011 is here. .
Btw, ET, were you responsible for this search-term in today’s incoming cache (not that there’s anything wrong with it… but it’s just not very Xmassy, is it)?
my usual search term involves an octopus, La Perla lingerie, Hayley Mills and and Formula One racing.
Steven, I just thought I’d mention this in passing. Is this the most recent World Tour that took in Berlin? I just (God help me) checked Miss B.’s webpage, which informs me that the tour took in 78 cities. So, perhaps there’s a bit of footage of your Harp Angel?
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5986382/Beyonce.I.Am.Yours.World.Tour.2010.HDTV.XviD-2HD
Ah, many thanks Professor M, however Beloved Wife gigged with Beyoncé on the occasion of MTV’s European Music Awards, 2009, so I doubt there’d be footage in the World Tour 2010 film… but I’ll have a peek anyway… maybe Julie Newmar’s backstage…
(ed.’s note: here’s one version of the video but the image seems reversed; also, strangely, it’s posted in August 2010, but I’m quite sure this is the 2009 performance with my Wife on the harp because it’s the one in which Beyoncé’s mask gets snagged in her, erm, hair… unless that’s part of the choreography)
There you have it. That fucking Obama–how devious can you get? He fakes you out with his Socialist Muslim Terrorist agenda but all the time he was plotting with the evil redskins to steal America from its rightful owners. Man…that’s cold…
Comrade DJ Sensei Mishari, this is a golden opportunity to monetize this nascent meme: let’s print up a few hundred thousand t-shirts featuring Obama-as-the-joker in a native American Chieftain’s headdress and a Hitler mustache with a keffiyeh around his neck in front of a communist flag with a pink triangle inset…
Enjoying the many and varied uses of of the word “overlord” is one of my favourite internet pastimes.
May there be many more in 2011!
[ed.'s note:
"Indian Overlord" has a freshness to it, Comrade ET, doesn't it? Great band name, decent video game and very possibly the title of a BDSM classic paperback from the UK, c. 1962! ]
The paperback would have Kodachrome colour photos of couples dressed head to toe in rubber drinking tea from china cups in a suburban backyard in Pinner, Surrey. A small Yorkshire terrier would be sniffing around for crumbs in between their ankles.
I scanned this very quickly, ET, and caught the phrase “rubber drinking tea” and thought I was missing out on something
No doubt there’s a vidclip advertising “rubber drinking tea” somewhere out there. and a warehouse deep in the Sonoran desert that ships the stuff to your home.
“Sonoran desert that ships the stuff to your home.” Either I don’t know where the Sonoran desert actually is or I still call camels ships of the desert or I’m channeling the works of Lee Rourke.
May 2012 continue as it started.
A) fuckme, ET, 2011 went by in a flash, didn’t it?
B) are you responsible for yesterday’s Incoming Search Phrase of the Day… ?
(isn’t it easier to bookmark the site instead?)
How the hell did someone get from that onto this site?
Rather too quick to accuse others Steven. A give away I think.
You sound under a lot of pressure at the moment. You post late at night. Given the amount of work and domestic duties you are undertaking it’s not inconceivable that a simple Google request like ” Neo-con activities in Congress” could end up as “coat of tiny scabs covering the head of my penis” at 3.00 in the morning when the eyelids stay shut longer than you intended .
Christ… you mean…
[ed.'s note: speaking of "posting late at night"... witness the timestamp on Mishari's comment #41... I think we have our man]
In his defence he says he has been playing a lot of Bridge over the holidays so “coat of tiny scabs covering the head of my penis” may be a Bridge term for all I know.
Steven, I think it’s important that you see this:
Good Gawd, Comrade DJ Sensei Mishari, it’s funny/absurd enough as a comedy video… until you realize it’s an actual product!
And how’s this for embodying the sickness of a culture in one concise headline:
At some point I’ll actually resume generating full-scale rants here; I’m still knee-deep in the technicolor pudding of launching my Beloved’s new musical project… we’ve added two singers (who will sing in parallel like the ladies in Sergio Mendes’ Brazill ’66) and today is the first rehearsal for the singers. Meanwhile, as a solo act, Beloved performed 21 shows this last December (twice, there were three gigs on one day) which means Offsprung and I have been building trans-galactic clay-based mud-pie factories on our own. You’d be surprised how time-consuming the latter activity can be. I informed Offsprung (5 this coming March) that there are 365 days in the year (we’ll save the leap year talk and the Mayan calendar for later) and that the day before yesterday was the end of the year (as we count these things, in Berlin) 2010. She therefore wanted to know: “So when is the world over, then?”
I didn’t have it in me to tell her the answer to that question is, according to various crypto-cabala-scholars and scientifically-inclined gnostics and bestselling authors channeling disembodied entities from all kinds of other dimensions , uh… 2012! Better learn to ride that bike soon, darling…
[ed.'s note: I was going to link a list of all the failed end-of-the-world predictions but the closest thing to a comprehensive list was this... on an odious Christer-site....]
UPDATE:
smirk
double smirk
MY TRIBUTE TO QUEEN ANNE
(from Salter’s Luck)
She got home at one, eight-feet-tall in her heels and the cool fuselage of her dress and hair of burnished blades. He was watching television like a good boy when she clomped into the bedroom waving hello but not speaking as though speaking’s a kind of touch and she wasn’t in the mood but he got a bobbing erection the instant he saw her in all her pomp and nametag.
L. Beedo.
Lola unsheathed her nude glory. Breasts and hair lifted and falling as the dress went up and she clomped into the bathroom in heels and zilch else to brush and floss and mop the angel-face off then proceeded to snore and smell of soap on her side of the bed within thirty minutes of walking through the door. A record. He wouldn’t even have minded the usual missionary position and get it over with. No touching the tits, don’t mess up my hair and keep that finger away from my rectum. Poor Salter sat knees-up beside her, treated to a view of a meter of tawny back and he clutched the remote. O wretched man who craveth a fuck.
Tears.
Robbie The Robot warped and blurred, swimming in them. Salter was ostensibly watching “Forbidden Planet” (Walter Pigeon, Patrick O’Neal, Anne Francis) with the sound off and he strained to make sense of the flick through the seawater filter of his grief. The Griffin-like monster, visible only as raw energy, howled and clawed the protective field around the ship. It would have blown Salter’s mind to learn that Griffins are a symbol of monogamy. A heroic crew member with his pastels-emitting blaster was seized and ripped apart. Anne Francis with her buttery coif and the spanking sarcasm of her dotted pout startled a recognition in him for she was his genuine Sexual Ideal and he correctly pegged the futility of his sex life to her unavailability.
Snuffed the tube and the reading lamp on his side of the futon and stood up. Suddenly saw himself running across the bedroom from an impossibly distant corner, axe over his head, bringing the blade down with a scream of regret to cut his frustrating girlfriend in two but the very cartoon of it horrified him and made him sorry and love her all that much more, exacerbating his desire, which frustrated him further, which re-ignited his anger, which again made him see himself running across the bedroom from an impossibly distant corner with an axe hefted over his head, bringing the blade down with a scream of regret to cut himself in two instead.
He crept miserably into the living room with an unrequited hard-on of devilish force and he knelt milking it across the gleaming black pumps with arched backs like onyx cats stacked in a diptych of sadism and sexual snobbery under the coat hooks by the door. He lay three lengths of solder-colored semen in her $300 heels, steadying himself with a hand on the sleeve of an old coat which stood like a priest with its back to Salter’s indiscretion. Not the first time he’d fucked those shoes either.
KURT NOTES
In November of 2009 I bought a published collection of “unpublished” (surely a misnomer?) short stories by Kurt Vonnegut. I wrote, soon after reading most of it:
Now, Dan, over at The Reading Experience, is bashing the book in terms which expose, in my opinion, the weaknesses of the academic approach to any Lit/Art/Culture which must, by necessity, do double-duty as populist product. Vonnegut’s populist origins/inclinations are spotlit in Look at the Birdie and threaten to jeopardize his already iffy position on a stool in the canon, the danger of which Dan warns us about in coded language:
Who are “those who would discount the author’s entire legacy” and why should their opinions count? “Self-apparently weak” by what, and whose, metric? Who, that matters, should this “scholarly audience” matter to? What is at stake here?
Vonnegut’s work is certainly not in danger of going out of print just because some abbots of academe decide it’s impure; quite the opposite: it’s when the tonsured ones are in a rapture over jealously-guarded texts in the belfry that one has to fear for the quality (and readership) of some poor author’s afterlife. Those are the books which ever-dwindling numbers will read and which are, in turn, prized by these monks for this very quality (unreadness). Why any tonsure ever considered considering Vonnegut to be belfry material is beyond me (surely ambitious phonies like Saul Bellow are more their speed), but I suspect it didn’t hurt that one of his books was grounded in a real-world-historical event worthy of “serious” academic attention (the firestorm-bombing of Dresden). Also, Slaughterhouse Five advertised Vonnegut as a flamboyantly polite pacifist at a time when chunks of the academy considered this to be a respectable lifestyle.
Vonnegut included his own enlarged-asterisk-like drawing of an asshole in his deceptively (or genuinely, or genuinely deceptively) casual Breakfast of Champions and that should have been the tip-off to the belfry monks that Vonnegut wanted the belfry monks to fuck off. Vonnegut’s ideal audience consisted, largely, in his heyday, of literate, middle-class Lefties who’d dropped out of college. You’d have to have a little bit of a liberal arts education to appreciate the psycho-political parables in Cat’s Cradle, yet not so much education that you deemed yourself incapable of responding properly to Vonnegut’s genteel Hoosier nihilism.
Dan dismisses Vonnegut-the-short-story-writer (Kurt Minor) as a processual phase in the evolution of Vonnegut-the-novelist (Kurt Major), arguing that Vonnegut abandoned his tale-telling-tail when he finally learned to walk upright…
…but I think Dan is missing the point that Vonnegut the populist was not just evolving as a technician but changing according to his audience’s needs and in response to the evaporating market for short fiction. Dan indicates that Vonnegut outgrew “stylistically bland, melodramatic, often sentimental” fiction when it’s more likely that those qualities were what got his early stories published when a writer could live from writing fiction for magazines.
Anyone who didn’t notice a “mind-blowing” or “let-it-all-hang-out” or “psychedelic” or “post-Watergate” quality to Vonnegut’s then-current work in the respective periods during which these very qualities were also commercial attributes wasn’t paying attention. Vonnegut was a professional writer who wanted and needed to earn money by publishing books which lots of people would read. This populist/mercantile/ pragmatic consideration is too often ignored by academic critics who don’t understand the double-impact that matters of class/money have on the history of the Arts. For above-it-all Art immune to fad and fashion, look to the rich kid who can afford to create the timeless Fuck You Artifact. Or to the super-outsider, beyond all questions or constraints imposed by selling. Good old, upper-middle class Hoosier KV was neither. He was the Artistic equivalent of a highly successful Cadillac salesman.
Dan posits an evolution from Kurt Minor to Kurt Major but I’d argue that the voice remains remarkably constant and that the early sentimentality or later phantasmagoria and/or fatalism (etc) are utilitarian, market-inspired cosmetics (not to mention bodily-age-related) and that the voice is the thing. Avid readers of KV read KV for the sound KV makes in one’s head. It is, in my opinion, an inspired misapprehension of the mechanics of Kurt’s Art to write, as Dan does:
This presumes a kind of concrete (vs imposed by fiat) narrative physics that Vonnegut needed special devices to work around; this is like sitting through a movie and wondering how it’s possible to hear the voice-over emanating from the title character’s head… and coming, with a relief, to the conclusion that the character must be telepathic. There are no absolute laws. Anything is possible in the imagination of the page. Dan has needlessly rationalized an excuse for Vonnegut’s apparent narrative liberties to satisfy laws or limits which Dan himself has imposed. The myth that there is any essential or structural difference between the quality/scope/freedom/requirements of Third Person Narrative and First Person Narrative is a literal-minded idiosyncrasy of certain critics and undermines Dan’s evaluation of Vonnegut’s work. I can write:
“Magda smelled the morning’s coffee and remembered the cafe in Portugal she’d first seen Elizabeth sipping some in” or “I smelled the morning’s coffee and remembered the cafe in Portugal I’d first seen Elizabeth sipping some in” or “you smelled the morning’s coffee and remembered the cafe in Portugal you’d first seen Elizabeth sipping some in” and the mechanical differences between these sentences are nil. I can do every bit as much in one POV as I can in another, barring a bizarre compulsion to worry about simulating the physical laws of the Real World. What about First Person narrative vs Third Person narrative in a story about… talking cats? Nothing on the page is Real. Everything Is Permitted (not to be confused with an admonition that Everything Will Sell). You can make and/or “break” as many “essential” imaginary narrative rules in 1,000 words as you can in 100,000.
Perhaps there are two schools of narrative analysis: the school that frets over Roman Senators speaking with Brooklyn accents in low-budget flicks from the 50s and the school that doesn’t. This (Now) is an era, remember, in which Hollywood films of The Cat in the Hat and Where The Wild Things Are require back-stories and psychological motivational subtext because some utterly random (era-contingent) Law is violated, apparently, if the audience is simply shown an island of Wild Things, or a cat in a hat, and expected to take this state of affairs for granted.
2.
In response to Dan’s put-down of Look at the Birdie I wrote, in his comment thread:
I have also written, here on TET, about KV and this particular book,
.
Vonnegut’s populist talent in “fluent simplicity” is either the result of very hard work or a prodigious gift, but it’s there in the early stories and very few writers can pull it off (even at Kurt’s most Hoosier, the voice is more technically sophisticated than any number of Brooklyners writing in McFA cadences about AIDs, Crack and Trust Fund Anomie). The academic critics who are still interested in Vonnegut to the extent that they would “save” him for posterity by chopping his oeuvre in half and discarding the “conventionally plotted, stylistically bland, melodramatic, often sentimental” short stories remind me of George Martin’s doomed remark that The Beatles “White Album” should have been released as a much “tighter” single disc of only the very best songs.
Very few of the people who have owned and loved that album would agree.
It’s Vonnegut’s freewheeling imagination that makes him so good for me. A bit like Indian film music where no-one has told them they can’t mix a Bavarian brass band with cool 50′s vibraphone led jazz in one track so they just go ahead and do it. You’re not sure why it makes sense and hangs together but it does.
The backwards sequence in Slaughterhouse 5 fed my imagination for years.
Good bit of writing Steven.
“The backwards sequence in Slaughterhouse 5 fed my imagination for years.”
Not to mention the royalties Marty owes Kurt for “Time’s Arrow”, Comrade DJ Sensei ET!
Is Time’s Arrow any good? I rather admired Amis taking on the challenge but it’s also easy to see the limitations of a longer piece of writing based on a narrative trick.
Could never bring myself to finish it so…uh… wouldn’t know…?
“Could never bring myself to finish it so……….”
Following the logic of the book does that mean you never actually started it?
(talkshow applause)
( restlessly taps pack of presenter’s question prompt cards on desk )
[ed.'s note: "Next up, stupid pet tricks..."]
[ps: was this the search term that brought you in today, ET...?]
Isn’t Dick Ratio the name of the chat show we’ve just been in?
(rim shot)
[Christ yer on a roll, ET! has something untoward happened at home or in the tool shed today? a bump on the head, or the shock of your life-partner reading your old emails, capable of activating a dormant talent...?]
By coincidence “rim shot” was the search term that got me here.
I’ll get my coat.
CROWD SERFING
ferfucksake turn off that television and spend 2 hours watching the mask torn off
http://metanoia-films.org/hr_watchonline.php
Thanks for the ‘Human Resources’ link, man. I watched the first few minutes and have now downloaded it to watch when I have a couple of spare hours of peace and quiet (2 AM). Looks absorbing…
Put on your goggles, M, secure the straps on your seat and set your Viddy Timer for 2am (though I must say that I wish now that I’d watched this, the first time, in broad fookin daylight)…
I have this tic: I see a piece of imperfect writing and want to tweak it. And so… (tweaks in bold type)…
SPEECH (à la Harold Pinter)
As many of you are aware, earlier today a number of people were attacked by an American drone in Afghanistan, including several who were meeting to fetch unclean water from a rusted barrel. We are still assembling all the facts, but we know that at least one human being who represented absolutely no threat to her professional killers was one of the victims. She is currently at a hospital in the area, and she is battling for her life.
We also know that at least dozens of people lost their lives in this tragedy. Among them were an artisan who has served his village for most of his life; and a young girl who was barely nine years old.
I’ve spoken to General David Petraeus and offered to double the resources of our mercenary forces in order to finish the job. Our deeply suspect worldview is currently ascendant, and you’ll never know what provokes our unspeakable acts. A comprehensive investigation is futile, and at my direction, an operative mentored by one of the thousands of Nazis we imported under Project Paper Clip is en route to a secret location to help coordinate our efforts to obliterate dissent. I’ve also spoken to the Democratic and Republican leaders in the House.
The Afghani woman wounded today was a friend of someone’s. She is not only a living being with the hypothetical rights and expectations conferred by birth, but she is also somebody who is worth less than zilch on our corporate-military ledgers. She is well liked by her children and well liked by her grandchildren. Her husband was slaughtered by us a week or two ago. So?
It’s not surprising that today this defenseless creature was doing what she always does — listening to the hopes and concerns of her terrified neighbors while trying to fetch unclean water from a rusted barrel in a country we’ve decided to invade, dominate and destroy. That is the essence of what our democracy is all about. That is why this is more than a tragedy for those involved. It is a tragedy for our increasingly corrupted souls and yet just another meaningless kill for our profligately barbarous, empire-building structure.
What Americans do at times of tragedy is to come together and indulge in self-congratulatory displays of faux emotion and magical thinking. So at this time I ask all Americans to join me and Michelle in keeping all the victims and their families, including the nameless Afghani washer woman, excluded from our thoughts about how noble we are. Those who have been injured, we are still gunning for them. And I know the Afghani washerwoman is as tough as they come, but I am doubtful that she’ll be able to sneeze without shitting her lungs after this one.
Obviously our hearts barely register the family members of those who have been slain unless they are white. We are going to get to the low-point of this amoral worldview, if we’re not already there. But in the meantime, I think all of us need to make sure that we’re offering absolutely no resistance to those in charge.
Thank you.
Don’t these things usually end with God Bless America?
I’m always appalled by how we respect the dignity of death over here but think nothing of showing the dead littered all over the road after whatever third world disaster it is this week.
Didn’t Obama win the Nobel Peace Prize? what on Earth for? Not being George W Bush is all I can think.
In which case……..
[ed.'s note: Comrade ET, I think the Nob was awarded to BO for being a... wait for it... Sexy Black Bush]
OVER THE COUNTERCULTURE, part 1
I left a comment on the Coffee House Press blog a couple of weeks ago, responding to an article the owner wrote; an uncharacteristically harmless comment, really. I know that blogs like these (in fact, the overwhelming majority of blogs), with comment-thread features, only affect to be interested in “conversation” or “debate”… what they want is lots of “positive feedback” (LOLs will do if everyone is short on time). These blogs are in place at all in order to either move actual commodities or to serve the blog-owner’s ego (or both). So I don’t, as a rule, leave comments expecting reasoned debate or stimulating virtual conversation but to seed ideas in the minds of a preciously-minute fraction of the readership, just as the occasional unexpected comments of others have, over the years, seeded ideas in mine.
Kornblum’s original post is the creation myth of his publishing house (which is one of the really prominent indie presses). It’s a fluffy article… one doesn’t, as a rule, include “controversial” material on a website dedicated to selling things (unless controversy is what’s being sold)… and my comment was a semi-fluffy counter-blurb to the effect that the leading edge of publishing is no longer on paper (even if this leading edge is largely, still, a quantity of potential energy; a placeholder for things to come).
The (extremely limited) exchange that ensued allowed me to drop an idea or two on the Coffee House Press blog that I’ve been working out recently. Kornblum may or may not have been interested in what I had to say… (laugh); a follow-up response (serious or otherwise) from Kornblum would have been nice but maybe too much of a shock, too.
If I have the time in the next few weeks I’ll develop one or two of the ideas I touched on in my lonesome impromptu editorial….
IMAGINARY SPEECHES, #2
Today (or soon, I guess; I’m always foggy about Easter and Labor Day, too), Whitey Americans of a Liberalish persuasion celebrate the birth of The One Darky We Wouldn’t Be Afraid To Be Alone In An Elevator With… MLK. Whether or not Darky-Americans would have won the socio-legal battle to be considered “human” in North America without MLK‘s efforts is hard to say. The U.S. was parka-deep in The Cold War 1.0, back then, and the government was on its best behavior, winning those hearts and minds. You couldn’t very well try to sell the rest of the planet on the wonders of the Ameerican Vay of Loif (as I have heard a mulleted German refer to it) while treating 10% of your own human population like donkeys and/or fairground attractions, now, could you?
As if to booby-trap the rhetorical question posed above, now that Cold War 1.0 is over and America is no longer on its best behavior, Darky-Americans have, indeed, reverted, largely, to their inherited roles as donkeys and/or fairground attractions. Perhaps this is also, slightly, down to the fact that no MLK (or Darky of his ilk) is any longer with us. Which is, as we know, no accident.
MLK was terminated because he went from being a harmless, golden-throated advocate of Human Rights in North America, to being a vociferous critic of the South East Asian War (ie, an advocate of Human Rights outside of America); he died by ratcheting the rhetoric up too many notches and being in a position to make the rhetoric effective. Ironically, his counterpart (The Rolling Stones to MLK’s Beatles), MX, died from the very opposite: for ratcheting the rhetoric down too many notches. MX began calling for the unity of all Serfs, of all colors, wandering dangerously away from his “White Devils” shtick.
The lesson in both assassinations being that it’s not what a World Figure says or does, per se, that gets one in lethal trouble with the Empire. The real mortal no-no is violating the Faustian terms and conditions of one’s contract. Which is just so fucking unprofessional. For example: John Lennon was finally assassinated for doing exactly the kind of thing that “radicals” like Tom Hayden still do (albeit rather feebly) to this day. But Lennon wasn’t given the World Fame Pill to act like anything other than a decadent, self-absorbed Pop Star, just as MLK wasn’t given his World Fame Pill to do anything other than make the US government look nobly tolerant while keeping his followers infinitely mellow and smilingly patient in an other-worldy, Joan-Baez-or-Mahalia-Jackson way. MX‘s World Fame Pill was administered to him, of course, to keep the White Devils of the Flyover deeply frightened…. the job inherited by Fiddy. Or whoever they are this year. And while we’re at it: are we sure we know why Muhammad Ali hasn’t been able to mumble a meaningful (or coherent) sentence in nearly thirty years…?
There will be many high-minded speeches/editorials today and some are certain to use one of two phrases (if not both) trademarked by MLK: “I Have A Dream” and “The Promised Land”. And someone, somewhere (in the NYT or the Pittsburgh Gazette or on a blog about the 1960s) will get off a bittersweet riff to the effect that Darky-Americans haven’t quite made it to that Promised Land; that MLK might be terribly disappointed in the extent to which this Mosaic goal is further from realization than ever. That The Promised Land is still somewhere across de fucking River Jordan or over a mountain or however the squares love putting it. The real point of my speech being that such an assertion is absurd. It’s wrong.
We made it to The Promised Land! We did!
But it sucked.
Thank you.
RANDOM NOTES REDUX
more random notes
about the photo: that’s Toulouse-Lautrec taking a shit on the beach; I think I found it here
Cool apothegms…your own?
Those Too-Loose-To-Rock (or ‘The Teapot’ as the tarts of Montmartre fondly referred to him) pix are eye-stretching…but is it Art? Or is it only Art if he cans the turds? Nah…I don’t buy that…the Act is the Art. Man crapping on beach is just a man crapping on the beach; T-L crapping on the beach is a statement…no? I dunno…I’m confused.
I’m going to go and have a crap in A. The National Gallery, B. The Tate Gallery and C. on someone’s front lawn. Then I’m going to assess the impact–aesthetic, moral and political–and get back to you.
[ed.'s note: speaking of which, an old friend (make that ex of an old friend) did this: http://www.neoaztlan.com/images/issue_5/bonvicini_don_t_mis_a_sec.jpg
alt view: http://www.neoaztlan.com/images/issue_5/bonvicini_don_t_mis_a_sec2.jpg
described as "Two-way mirror structure, stainless-steel, toilet unit,concrete floor, aluminum, fluorescent lights, 250cm x 140cm x 190 cm" and first shown outside the Tate]
1. My own little apothegms, M, my own; you’re asking yourself why I’m not rolling in the proceeds from t-shirt sales, yes…?
2. It was a friend of Teapot’s who documented the doo (and its doing)… I’ll have to track down the source to recall the chum’s name…
(I was going to decorate your comment with a little something from int’l Art colossi Gilbert & George but I don’t have the stomach for it, as it turns out…. prefer to post nude black chicks in this part of the thread)
Seriously, you could become the ‘interesting t-shirt’ king. A million students are itching to give you money, man. Don’t let them down.
I hope you don’t mind if I use that T-L image. It’s set off a train of thought (or what passes for thought north of my eyebrows) that I want to tease out and post. I wish I knew more about the photo…oh,well…google, here I come.
[ed.'s note: “I hope you don’t mind if I use that T-L image.”
Now that would be good for a chuckle and a sneer… if I “minded”… wouldn’t it? Shameless image thief, me]
those Gilbert & George turds are enormous when you see the actual pictures, some of them the height of a person. Even considering the size of them they are quite good at sneaking them into compositions.
I find their world-view rather vile but I saw a retrospective of theirs years ago and it was pretty impressive stuff in terms of visual imagery. Like stained-glass windows done by a couple of weirdoes. Apparently they are quite charming in real life. They live off Brick Lane in London so presumably not too far from our PH blogmeister. One of them is apparently married! I know I thought the same.
Incidentally I re-visited the drawings on TET 6.0 and realised I’d never really thanked you for doing such a good job of putting them up there. Mea culpa etc.
[ed.'s note: always thought G&G would make excellent villains in a hip kid's fairytale filmed by Jeunet et Caro]
1. “One of them is apparently married! I know I thought the same.”
Erm.. uh… why, whatever do you mean…?
2. All the thanking is mine to do, Comrade
3. Don’t forget Freddy Mercury was “married”, too… whatever it is I’m trying to say with that (and I suppose you’re going to tell me that Pierre et Gilles just had a bad breakup with Pamela Anderson… )
Oh, I do like this comment about Big Ticket Art I made during this conversation inspired by your work:
Yes I wonder if we look close enough whether we can see them as extras in “The 5.,000 Fingers of Dr.T” ?
Starring, again, the ultra-macho Tony Randall. Erm… are *you* married, Comrade ET…?
[ed.'s note: It's been pointed out to me that I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about; I somehow confused Randall's star-vehicle, "The 7 Faces of Mr. Lau", with Seuss' "The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T". Sincere apologies for any confusion or life-changing screen damage this mistake on my part may have caused]
No but I’ve been with my other half for 30 years this year. Given that we work together as well it’s a bit extraordinary it’s still going so strong.
We both come from broken homes ( I certainly contributed strongly to breaking mine ) so have never felt the need to make it official.
Seconded. We’d have skipped the ritual (where quasi-Christian magical thinking meets the file-cabinet-kitsch of The State) completely if not for all kinds of international inconveniences otherwise. I’ve written elsewhere that the humorless teuto-prick who officiated over the ceremony nearly found his asshole gripping my ankle…
It’s the short German one that’s married. These are my limitations and prejudices coming to the fore obviously but there’s nothing about him that would remotely suggest marriage material to a woman.
Done no doubt for a residence permit/ UK passport,
When I lived in London at the end of the 70′s I used to drink in a local pub with about 10 brothers from a large Irish family who regularly married Moroccan women for cash. I went to one of the weddings as I could speak passable French which was the only European language the family had and the groom couldn’t speak it.. A gang of Irish builders at one end of the registry office with ill-fitting suits and plaster on their boots and a respectable well-dressed and rich Moroccan family at the other end.
The man who conducted the “wedding” had to turn a blind eye to virtually every detail of the event. It’s not every wedding that ends with a handshake, an envelope of cash and where the groom goes back to work whilst the bride goes off with her boyfriend.
[ed.'s note: Immediately after marrying my first wife, I did, in fact, go off on a date with my lover (the Persian girl)... but that was another sort of thing (and, in any case, if any cash had been exchanged it should have flowed in my direction, for the Green Card the venal harpy, who I really slept with in a conjugal bed and everything, off and on for 13 years, eventually got out of it).
Marriage number 2 (the Eternal One) was more conventional: our 4-year-old daughter was the sole witness]
KOSMIKOMIK
It’s like some hilarious deadpan set-up from a hip hybrid of vintage SNL and second-season Monty Python…. the host’s worshipful introduction (the interviewee’s list of works and accomplishments; the closeup of his Lincolnesque visage)… the perfect timing of the cut, at 1:31, to… Mr. Lilly’s preposterous fucking appearance…
(if I’d seen this at the age of 16, would I have pored, with quite such painstaking zest, over Programming and Metaprogramming the Human Biocomputer (a book I still own my original copy of)….?)
THE PEOPLE’S CLASS WAR HAIKU
from The Pig and the Snake
and The Comment Abroad
http://thoughcowardsflinch.com/2011/01/03/on-the-multiculturalismzizek-debate/#comment-22292
Titanium Balls
Listen to the profoundly human quality of the rage and grief in that voice; also note the perfect joke in DR’s cheapness (flying commercial!) exposing him to this moment. More importantly, the heroic youth in this video shows the way forward: he expresses not only outrage at the filthy old beast but revulsion. He’s transcended the shackles of his conditioning. Or maybe (even more incredibly) he’s a Pure: never conditioned in the first place. But that’s why “we” find it so difficult to deal with these Plutocratic Plutonians… “we” envy them, “we” admire them, “we” want their approval. That’s the Primal Trick; the Auto Necrotic Asphyxiation; the Psycho-Serfdom clause in the social contract (how do you think they controlled hundreds of slaves at a time, on the good old plantations, with mere handfuls of crudely-armed overseers? The slaves were/are in love with Massa). Get in touch with your Edenic Nausea, Comrades! Let this 17-year-old lead the way…
IN THE NAME OF REASON: BE A “NUTJOB”
The only sane, logical, clear-eyed and non-duped reactions to the ridiculous Tucson Narrative I have thus far read emanate exclusively from wacko nutjob paranoid conspiracy websites. Certainly not a jot of useful, un-duped, laser-eyed analysis is coming from the HackAcademic Left, despite the fact that this latest event will, without a doubt, open the gulag door for the next plague of draconian measures. Let’s not forget that it was the dubious fizzle of an underwear bomb which heralded full-body scanning (and unsanitary junk-jiggling) at the airport. Soon to be coming to your banks, cinemas, kindergartens and grocery stores.
Intellectual Snobbery is inhibiting the kind of cross-demographic info-sharing we could genuinely do with right now. A highly-esteemed colleague on my Facebook has posted something about Rosa Luxemburg today but has yet to say anything about the Tucson Narrative that strays beyond the MSM-shepherded conversation (ie, all Palin-and-or-gun-control-oriented). How is Rosa Luxemburg more worthy of contemplation than the creepy machinations of the here and now? Are serious thinkers only interested in topics decorated with the requisite patina of age? And is the allure of this patina in its glamor or its relative safety?
I have a dear friendship of 30-years’ standing with a scholar for whom the romance of the October Revolution of 1917 is one of the chief ordering motifs of his life; however, just try discussing the synchronicity of the connections between Mark David Chapman and John Hinckley Jr with him. Trotsky this, Trotsky that: fine… but John Lennon was our Trotsky and his assassination deserves some intellectual attention. One would think that Historians might be interested in our direct inheritance of the ripples, repercussions and recapitulations of the long-past “world events” they are meant to study. They can’t really believe that the Caligula’s, Gilles de Rais‘, John Browns and Gavrilo Princips were all one-offs and/or epiphenomenal.
Just as it suddenly became not only acceptable but de rigueur for academics to turn their deconstructive urges on Pop (The Dark Knight was quite a fave on Yakkademic blogs like The Valve; and Camille Paglia just loves her some Billy Collins and Anna Nicole Smith), why not drop the class-erected firewall on Politics? Allowing the Political Class (and its butlers, The Press and Academe) to define (and broker discussions on) Politics is tantamount to letting the Mafia define, and administrate the narrative on, Crime. The hoi polloi have more to offer than graphic novels and street art: why not check out what they’re doing with Conspiracy Theory…? Because Conspiracy Theory is now the Enlightened version of the Vernacular discussion of Politics. Some daring public intellectuals (Michael Parenti is a great example) have already crossed over. It’s a brave new territory. Plenty of room for niche-carving.
The Evil Right (I include Republicrats and Demoblicans alike in that category) have their think-tanks, acronym’d spook clubs and whatever else they have organized with unlimited funding and the unprincipled intellectual talent they manage to siphon off the top of Harvard, Yale, Cornell and MIT (et al) every year… what does the Flummoxed Left have? In a collective or aggregate sense? Nader’s Raider’s?
There is surely a surfeit of mind-fucking conspiracy unsense smeared all over the Net. Obviously. I may never stretch my sensibilities to a capacity capable of reading about “shape-shifting Reptilians” without rolling my eyes (or even to the point of bothering to read the stuff at all)… but it is as a result of very pointed conditioning that we consider such nutty theories to differ, not by degree but by category, from the hallucinatory propaganda that would have us believe that we are mutilating Iraqis and Afghanis in order to bring them democracy or that the Pres and his minions and masters give a fuck about all the little people who form the heap the top of which they waltz upon. In other words: 80% of everything you read, watch and hear is molten bullshit, whether a talking head in a suit and a glue-on haircut told it to you or a ranty huffer in a trailer park hammered it out on a taco-smeared keyboard at 3am. One is fecal, the other is fecal with a ribbon around it.
The fact remains that not only does the suit not make the woman or man… it has zero bearing on the validity of his or her data.
There is a grassroots roar of clear-eyed, well-researched (yes, that’s what I said) opinionation out there and it has been assembled by the closest thing to a corporate Thinktank or a CIA that you will find on the non-fascist bank of the river of sensibilities: call it the CFI. The fact that this unofficial bureau of Collective Folk Intelligence appears, often, to keep company with nastier, wackier, unverified crap should not be daunting if we, again, merely take a closer look at the nasty, wacky, unverified crap that we’ve been swallowing from the Dan Rathers and Cokie Roberts’ and Mike Wallaces we’ve all grown up with. Pick-and-choose was always the paradigm if you weren’t a total dupe, no…? It’s a matter of sifting.
I read the following comment about the sloppily-done Passion Play in Tucson from a “regular joe” and the justice and sweet reason of it encouraged me; this is not from the “well-researched” category… this is from the category of “I am from the planet Earth and am familiar with the behavior of actual humans”:
My Advanced High School Physics teacher drilled into my head the wisdom that there is no such thing as a stupid question. Or questioning. Don’t be afraid that the rest of the class will snicker if you raise your hand to express a doubt about something that every 9-year-old takes for granted.
DISSERTATION in a SENTENCE, PT 1
What’s interesting watching the final concert of Ziggy Stardust at the Rainbow is how out of kilter the band is to Bowie. They remind me of pop contemporaries the Sweet – lads who saw an opening ( stop it! ) in dressing up in lurex and glitter and who went for the look rather than the lifestyle.Bowie on the other hand appears to be in another imaginative universe. I could imagine that if he’d been a Noo Yawker that the band would be living the androgynous life too.
I’m not a massive fan – his voice like Jagger’s really grates on me – but can admire from afar.
Interesting as well in that film to see all those exotic costumes being put on in a shit-hole British 70′s backstage dressing room and watching Bowie dressed as an intergalactic cyber-geisha drinking tea out of a polystyrene cup. To rehydrate shouldn’t he be re-absorbing his body fluids through interstellar osmosis…..or something?
Which even DB himself noted (in reference to the slickened glam of that disappointing Velvet Goldmine flick); the “movement” came out of equal parts trash bin and boredom. There are always cast-off citizens just crying to be claimed by Leper Messiahs and then semi-validated when the mainstream catches up (just ask Bette Middler or that GaGa thingy). My only “problem” with DB himself is that people want to treat the package as High Art when it’s just, in the end, great fun (if it’s great fun for you). Well, no: I take that back, a little. Scary Monsters is a fairly prescient political statement. Otherwise, was Bowie ever as good, in a serious way, in his various aspects, as the people he famously ripped off? Scott Walker was a better singer, Jacques Brel was a better songwriter, Little Richard a more flamboyant Queen, Burroughs an edgier conceptualist and, you know… Marcel Marceau…
But Bowie had the Aryan Alien look down pat and you can’t beat that in the arena of postwar media myth-making! (the only minority group that features in more films than either Nazis or Extraterrestrials do would have to be Vampires… and he even played one of those, once..)
(Just Googled “Jacques Brel” to double-check that it’s a single “L” and discovered this: “Canadian Terry Jacks’ version of “Seasons in the Sun” became a global pop hit in 1974, topping the charts internationally.” That was written by Jacques Brel? Next you’ll be telling me that Bowie almost co-wrote “My Way”…)
PS Comrade ET: did you come in on the following search term, culled from the cache…?
Meanwhile… along those lines…erm… (re)name this tune:
Edward Taylor – poet?
%&&***&*((**(*( ? )$$$$$T wept, &**&^*&£ $%%&(*(( &&** $$%%^£ )$&&”&*£( NYRW)*^ &&%$£”R$% etc. etc.
Really?
The Mireille Matthieu has a surprising change of tone if you pronounce “quite” in the title in English.
[ed.'s note: a deftly polyglot-poetical remark, ET! Would Willie Nelson or the Pet Shop Boys quite get it...?]
Steve-a-reeno, I’m intrigued by your ‘…Trotsky this, Trotsky that: fine… but John Lennon was our Trotsky…’.
I’d be very grateful if you’d elaborate (if you have the time and/or inclination, obviously)…
Sir M! The Lennon-Trotsky comparison is more about the grass-is-always-greener (or redder)-in-other-totalitarian-regimes attitude than any real parallels between Trotsky’s life and Johnny’s… though Johnny was, neatly, born a couple of months after Trotsky’s exit. But why all the attention paid to Leon’s assassination, by our Lefty yakkademics, and so little to Johnny’s? No intellectual vigor spent on all those jarring “lone gunman” discrepancies in Chapman’s case, but, imagine (or Imagine) if it had been claimed that Ramón Mercader was merely a nut obsessed with Trotsky’s fame?
I wonder how many Left-leaning intellectuals who still mourn, to this day, the political murder of Rosa Luxemburg, contemplate the political murders and near-murders which appeared to cluster in that spooky season which stretched from shortly before, to shortly after, Reagan’s inauguration? It was not so very long ago at all. And the only place I’ve seen anyone mention the irregularities surrounding Reagan’s botched butchering (the super-long ride to the hospital; the weird little razor-thin disc that had entered in a slit between his ribs; Hinckley’s close connection to the Bush family) was in Kitty Kelly’s biography. And, of course, the nutjob wacko bigfoot conspiracy sites which reference Kelly’s research.
How many of these guys who can go into the ins-and-outs of Stalin’s counter-revolutionary perfidies are also aware of the fact that a guy named Raymond Lee Harvey (couldn’t make it up) was arrested under suspicion of attempting to off Jimmy Carter before the 1980 election? What about peacenik Marley’s attempted assassination and eventual untimely death in 1981? Is the story about Carl Colby’s just-prior-to-that visit of Bob true? Is there a tenured academic in America who will bother wondering?
I wonder if Rosa Luxemburg focused her energies on safely distant and glamorous historical matters like the assassination of Abraham Lincoln… or if she was focused on concerns a little closer, for her, to home? Liberalish Thinkers don’t seem to get the inherent poignance in cheering “regime change” (or its false alarms) during hopeful photo-ops in Iran (a couple of years back) and now in Tunisia and Egypt… as though oppression, like a quantity in physics, operates on some rule of force in which the intensity accelerates as a function of time and distance. It’s too much to expect ambitious and/or tenured thinkers to hit the barricades with Molotov cocktails in Georgetown or Berkeley the next time the centurions taser some innocent fucker to death, but couldn’t they at least pay some lip service to the fact that tyranny is not finished with us nor simple in its guises and goals and is just as likely to be White, Western and Now?
World-famous Pop singers are Politicians; would anyone argue that disgraced candidate John Edwards was, at any point, more powerful and influential than John Lennon? Lennon espoused his own semi-Situationist platform (constituted of evolving components from the bigger-than-Jesus riff to the anti-war stuff and the liberationist super-slogans like Imagine and Woman is the Nigger of The World)… would any experienced adult argue that Edwards or Romney or Hillary or any of those fuckers stand for anything more than getting and keeping power? A principled politician gets a target on her/his heart. Lennon was a principled politician.
Lennon’s late-period songs were his political speeches and they repeat over and over in our heads; people will remember passages from Instant Karma or God long after they’ve forgotten Obama’s boilerplate rhetorical flourishes. Bush had his “thousand points of light” and Reagan had his “surly bonds of earth”… are these more substantive than “God is a concept by which we measure our pain?” Isn’t “Imagine there’s no hunger” just as famously evocative as “I had a dream”?
When a guy with that much ground-level political power is killed in San Salvador (Bishop Romera, 1980, say) or Nigeria, the Commie Hackademics address themselves to the matter and see right through it. Or when there’s a brown guy who hasn’t done much beyond being the victim of a miscarriage of justice, they wear t-shirts that say Free Leonard Peltier or Free Mumia. How about a few high-profile Lefty Thinkers wear t-shirts saying Who Killed Lennon?
That’s what I meant by that, M. Our Leading Thinkers are daydreaming pussies.
Thanks for that, man. ‘Our Leading Thinkers are daydreaming pussies’. You’ll get no argument from me.
I made this especially for you (and your little one: I noticed that my children loved this tune from infancy):
Fabnormous, Sir M!
Oh wait… fuckers.
Yeah, sorry about that. For some reason (that I suspect you may be more au fait with), the majority of my vids are ‘blocked in Germany’.
Why Germany? Very annoying but if you just go through a proxy server you should have no problem. I was especially looking forward to your daughter’s reaction because this track seems to provoke universal pleasure: everyone I’ve ever played it for–from my kids in their infancy to their great-grandparents–loves it.
I was curious to see if my theory (such as it is, i.e. that this tune transcends age, race, class etc. in its ability to tickle the pleasure centres) would hold. Mind you, I expect you have a copy of this somewhere anyway… [ed.'s note: if it's in the boxed set, I have it... now, where is that boxed set...?]
No intellectual vigor spent on all those jarring “lone gunman” discrepancies in Chapman’s case, but, imagine (or Imagine) if it had been claimed that Ramón Mercader was merely a nut obsessed with Trotsky’s fame?
Interesting point and I have to say mea culpa. I’m as guilty as Joe Six-Pack of making easy assumptions based of information filtered through the bland, sausage-making machine that is the capitalist media.
I catch myself doing it and chide myself for intellectual (and probably moral) laziness. I should take the advice I give my children more seriously: question everything. Who is saying what? What is their agenda? What is their real agenda? Cui bono? Etc etc…
“I’m as guilty as Joe Six-Pack of making easy assumptions based of information filtered through the bland, sausage-making machine that is the capitalist media.”
I find that being as cynical as humanly possible at all times (except while feeding my daughter or giving my wife a neck-rub) is the safest setting, M. People mistakenly believe that cynicism is some sort of fun-dampener, soul-shriveler or quality-of-life-reducer. Oh, no, far from it: it’s a 24-hour party, eight days a week, in this skull. No more nasty shocks or let-downs. Harvey Keitel and Dennis Hopper are (were) both staunch conservatives, you say, and Gandhi and Nico were racists and Walter Cronkite was an habitué of Bohemian Grove and Vlad screwed around on Vera before writing a laudatory note to LBJ? Such news has lost its youthful power to wound me.
Re: Cui bono… or, in the case of Irishmen in Liberace glasses and cowboy hats: quare Bono
Steven but what you describe is not real cynicism. I figured most of that out too except the Gandhi accusation but I’m not sure what angle you are taking so I’d need more info on that one.
Real cynicism ( to follow on from your examples ) is when you can’t feed your daughter and forget what shit life can serve up at the same time, when you’re checking your watch when rubbing your wife’s neck.
I’d say you’re a dualist – able to enjoy life whilst not blind to its crapness at the same time. A cynic only goes in one direction surely? ( don’t call me shirley etc.etc. )
I’m not attempting to polish your edges here but having had experience with a grade A cynic when younger I never detect the monotonous defensive blinkered world-view that a cynic serves up on these threads.
Surely, you mean ‘relentless sceptic’? [Don't call him 'Shirley'-Guest Ed.]
Shirley, the “cynic” line was a joke, Comrades DJs ET and M, but the Gandhi jab is laid out very nicely here (excerpted from the place I first discovered it, years and years back).
I suppose that’s the one benefit of putting people on pedestals: it makes it easier to see their feet of clay.
By way of reparation for the last aborted music attempt, here’s one that isn’t banned in Germany:
Excellent, M… La Sedgewick (sp?) meets one of my favorite Beatles cover versions (actually prefer it to Smokey’s)
I know it’s almost blasphemous to say it, and much as I love Smokey Robinson, I prefer this version too. The sparser, leaner arrangement and John’s husky, pleading vocal just seem to suit it better.
Says it all, doesn’t it? ‘…frequently critical of the United States and Israel…’.
Morris trots out the phrase as though such criticisms were self-evidently unacceptable.
Of course, he neglects to mention that as the head of the International Atomic Energy Commission, it was El-Baradei’s job to be critical of countries (like Israel) who have nuclear weapons and refuse to allow inspections. Cant piled on hypocrisy piled on dishonesty: in other words, your typical Zionist neocon.
In a curious aside, I entered into a correspondence with an American named James Russell, who’s the Professor of Armenian at Harvard. He wrote to me after seeing one of my youtube videos.
It was all very odd: he was much given to gushing and was very insistent that I must come to Boston and stay with him. I soon discovered (from articles that he’d written in Ha’aretz) that he was a rabid Zionist and it became clear to me that I was being cultivated in an attempt to shore-up his liberal ‘some-of-my-best-friends-are-Arabs’ positioning.
When I asked him about his Zionism and wanted to know how he could be comfortable with the fact that he–an American whose family had been in the US for a century and in Europe for a 1000 years before that–had the right to move to the Occupied West Bank, to carry an assault rifle and to live under civil law, while a Palestinian, whose family had been there since time out of mind, was subject to military law, would be shot dead if he even so much as picked up a rock and had no right to free movement on his own land.
He answered by way of an anecdote about how he told a Palestinian neighbour in the Occupied Territories that they must learn to love the land together blahblahblah…it was a masterpiece of un-self-awareness, of mutton-headed obtuseness and of patronising happy-talk.
I realised that I simply couldn’t even be bothered to make the effort to set him straight and that I just can’t be friendly with a Zionist, anymore than I could be with a racist, an anti-semite or a fascist. He bombarded me with emails for a while but I think he eventually got the message.
The whole episode was deeply depressing. Here was an otherwise highly intelligent man, a fully-tenured Professor at Harvard, spouting the most bone-headed guff and giving the nod to a whole movement (the ‘settlers’, the most rabid, bigoted and violent of whom are, inevitably, Americans) that’s based on a racist premise and looks to a Bronze Age cult for its moral authority. Christ…I despair sometimes.
“It was all very odd: he was much given to gushing and was very insistent that I must come to Boston and stay with him. ”
Invited you to stay with him? On the basis of a YouTube video? Good Gawd; this man was clearly either A) disturbed B) not quite forthcoming about the direction of his romantic interests C) setting you up. Possibly D). The last time I had a professor (he was half German, half Persian) befriend me with suspicious ease, it turned out he was hoping I’d take his lonely American wife off his hands.
Re: Using rhetorical means to de-program a committed Zionist… I’m trying to imagine trying. Beware any friendly emails you might happen to get from the office of Alan Dershowitz as a result of this…
Re: the Groaniad: from the people who brought you Dynamite Fortune Gong nominee Julian “Leaky-dumps” Assange…
UPDATE
PS About Smokey’s version vs John’s: I also think The Beatles do Twist and Shout better than the Isley Brothers (or the song’s original performers; can’t remember the group’s name now but I think they were “white”). Some songs just come off better with a steady, square beat and a stricter, melismatics-free (or lite) adherence to the melody. Ever hear Al Green’s version of a Beatles song? Doesn’t work. “Soul” isn’t a magical attribute you can sprinkle over any arrangement to make any and every song better. But that’s just one of a million examples of positive racism we’ll have to eliminate before negative racism can be dealt with effectively. We aren’t duped by it but many, many are.
Having said all that, I still don’t expect to get away with pressing my sincere opinion that Duran Duran’s version of White Lines (featuring cameos from the originals) rocks hardest. Or that, given the choice between seeing The Beatles live in ’66, or Sly and the Family Stone in ’69, I’d opt for Sly without needing to think about it.
re: Gandhi I would have thought he hadn’t disentangled himself entirely from the Indian caste system but I didn’t know the other stuff.
not so much a cynic more a plodding pedantic obviously.
Do you know about the circumstances of Gandhi’s wife’s death, ET? Quite a tale.
Here’s a compact version of it I’ve found (appended to which you will find something humorous from that post’s comment thread):
mirth-inducing comments
Thankgod for believers, eh?
Christ, man…I was unaware of all of this stuff. Obviously, anyone who’s pushed as ‘saintly’ sends my bullshit detectors crazy and any Hollywood biopic must be taken with a truck-load of salt, but still…Gandhi was even more of a plaster saint than I assumed.
Fucking ‘believers’…they’ll do for us all yet…
[ed.'s note: Godsbless ye friggin Internets, M. The scales have fallen from our eyes]
To paraphrase Steely Dan: “Egypt’s cheap, but it’s not Free”… or…. YANKEES IN THE SKY BOX, THIRD-WORLDERS ON THE PLAYING FIELD, YET AGAIN
DEPT of PEOPLE ARE STRANGE: “List of Knobs Who Claimed to be Jesus” [ed.'s note: surely Jesus himself needs to go at the beginning of this list]
here’s another Japanese Jesus… he supposedly brews a mean sake!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/5326614.stm
I like this final line from the report:
“Yet many Christians have discovered that the Japanese view of religion can be rather baffling…”
Baffling… unlike the belief that the Super Being who created a trillion cubic light years of time and space sent an unfathomably tiny, carbon-based version of himself to an infinitesimal town on a speck of a planet in a smudge of a solar system on the rim of a nondescript galaxy about 4.3 billion years after the beginning of Time to be nailed to boards by bronze-age Romans at the behest of bronze-age Jews in a magical deal to absolve the same bronze-age Jews (and some other members of the species) of their “sins”, which are defined as grievous moral errors by the very Super Being who designed the moral equipment of the “sinners” … after not only providing the means and materials with which to “sin” but designing many of the urges (eg, the reproductive urge and its naturally corollary behaviors) as persistent and powerful compulsions the denial of which can result in insanity. Have I mentioned that the Super Being who sent Himself to be ritually murdered is also His own Son and sometimes manifests Himself as a third character called The Holy Ghost (with no specific attributes differentiating Him from His other two guises) and that He created His own mother, whose vagina he never touched on the way out of the womb? Or that, in the guise of His own Son, He supposedly ate and drank but never pissed, farted or shat for 33 years? But none of that is “baffling”.
Yeah!
Don’t forget the highly logical wine and biscuit parties on Sunday mornings!
I always wondered why those biscuits aren’t Christoform, Comrade ET… aren’t they meant to be little cannibal voodoo effigies, after all? And isn’t blood more salty than alcoholic in flavor? [ed.'s note: well, except in the case of alcoholic priests]
I’ve never entirely understood what’s going on there. Speaking as someone interested in animation and puppetry it’s interesting how objects and materials are transformed to become something else but the way that’s used to exert power in the case of the RC church is frankly repulsive.
In one of George Franju’s films there’s a scene of an RC ritual which makes you feel like you’re an uncomprehending visitor from outer space.
As I always say, ET: if you can get people to believe in the Jesus narrative, what can’t you get them to believe? Belief in Magic Bullets, Moon Landings, OBL and WMD are each a piece of cake in comparison.
Indeed.
Anne Atkins a journalist and religious heavy-breather of the English variety i.e appears and sounds utterly reasonable until you stop and listen, told us on Radio 4′s Thought for the Day segment for the morning news that the most plausible interpretation of the Easter story was that Jesus died and then came back to life.
The most plausible?
Surely the most plausible interpretation was that they made the whole thing up.
[ed.'s note: most plausible explanation... least plausible that they'd actually use it]
[speaking of the fucking implausible... why aren't the dwindling minorities of the sane in North America streaming away into Canada and Mexico or wading out into either Ocean in sheer fucking terror yet?]
EGYPT’S CHEAP BUT IT’S NOT FREE, PART DIEU… or…. ZIZEK’S PULLING NOSE HAIRS AGAIN
[picture: Bizlam's Honeytrap Fundamentalists]
“[Zizek] is not trying to intellectually browbeat people into submission, but to radically shift any willing person’s way of thinking who comes into contact with his…” comforting McLuhanesque paradoxes and panderingly optimistic, proffered-as-daring commonplaces. (Sentence-completion courtesy of yours truly)
Tell it, Slavoj! Except, of course, that A) re: “There, where we are fighting a tyrant, we are all universalists,” the “tyrant” is the guy they threw sticks and bottles at because they couldn’t throw bottles at *US* (who oppress them, backed by our gunboats, by living off everyone below us on the pyramid while deferring politely to everyone above) and B) re: “freedom”: you mean the “freedom” of an hour or a week or a month; the “freedom” of chanting en mass and holding up CIA-painted “Game Over” signs and getting it all out of their systems before the inevitable yoke goes back on?
And C) re: “proof against that cynical idea that somehow Muslim crowds prefer some kind of religiously fundamentalist dictatorship,”… one imagines that, choosing between a Christian Fundamentalist Dictatorship… ie BIZLAM (chief Diety: Dallah) and a Muslim one, they’d probably opt for the Devil they know. If they had a choice, of course.
Because isn’t one of the “benefits” of letting the Bad (vs Good) Fundamentalists take over, after a “revolution”, the provision of a default pretext for a good old fashioned Murrkan Invasion (or defenses-softening “economic sanctions” at the very least…)? Which is why they had to make Saddam “I Speet on the Koran” Hussein look like a Fundamentalist.
Not that I expect Slavoj to toy with *those* kinds of paradoxes; very bad for sales. Let’s all just sit back and watch the daily wage of the average Egyptian worker shoot through the roof now that the “tyrant” is “gone”.
During the first 30 seconds of this, Mart does something comedically terrifying, three or four times, with his mouth. Are his famous choppers acting up? Are they channeling politically incorrect mutterings from Larkin? What’s going on here?
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11163
THE TRASHY TET RADIO SHOW OVERSHARE
[FILE DEFUNCT] because MegaUpload is FUCKED
ANNALS of the EMAILS from the AGE of NAUSEA
Steven, Just checking but you don’t work at the Manchester branch of Boots do you?
The tuna and sweetcorn sandwich I bought there a few weeks back tasted like several people had added a “secret sauce” to the ingredients. Perhaps the foulest thing I have ever eaten and I’ve eaten unintentionally black boiled chicken when I worked in Russia.
In response to your pieces above I have been trying to formulate a comment about what democracy actually is but despite the various examples currently dotted around the world I’m none the wiser.
Fook, ET… you’ve rumbled me… and so quickly…!
Re: Democracy: it’s a word with a definite aura but no realistically-functional definition, conveniently.
“Fook, ET” Impressive Mancunian accent SA , the net is closing in.
Just seen Catfish sent to me by PH blog-host Mishari. Not bad and particularly interesting in the light of the upheavals on Politely Homicidal. When it began I was expecting something a bit indie/whimsical but it’s a lot creepier than that. Difficult to tell at the end whether it thinks it’s resolved itself ( adding further unintentional creepiness ) or whether it’s just gob-smacked by the neediness and delusions of those featured in the film.
many think it’s a fake documentary. If it is it has a neat trick to throw you off the scent. It uses 2 mentally disabled kids so you think the film-makers would never exploit them for fictional purposes and plays on your assumption that such kids wouldn’t want to act their roles for the film. Clever.
Re: Catfish: the explosive gusher of cultural artifacts blowing through my mind via the Net Pipe assures that I only get to ruminate on “new stuff” for a day or two before it vacates the memory banks, leaving nothing but scents and smudges. I had to Google to get it all back. I remember looking at a few trailers for Catfish (which caused a stir on sites like Hipster Runoff and HTMLGIANT right before its release) and thinking: Blair Witch 2010. The New Fake is nearly as slick as the Old Real! Now you’ve got me interested…
UPDATE:
Watching this interview with the “real” Megan, I revisit my original skepticism with this thought: maybe what’s fake (The New Fake) about Catfish is the conceit of innocence on the part of the filmmakers? Ie, I can imagine that they decided to “document” this story after Nev had already mostly rumbled (that word again) “Megan”. Otherwise, would they really have bothered, initially, to waste any time documenting Nev’s online friendship with an 8-year-old? Are hipsters like that?
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/video/catfishs-angela-wesselman-speaks-romance-fantasy-computer-11836656
My feeling was Blair Witch as well .
But I wasn’t actually bothered whether it was real or not. As you say the premise is a bit odd but it plays nicely on the film-maker’s vanity and thus perfectly in keeping with the FaceBook generation. What’s not clear is why the painter keeps sending them paintings. Are they buying them off her? My suspicions over that would have been triggered long before the revelation that the “hot” elder daughter is completely fictional.
But as a yarn it works okay. A tougher directorial eye would have emphasised the fact that the delusions are continuing and seemingly being sanctioned by the film-makers. I can’t help feeling that Nev would be far more fucked up by the duplicity going on – he’s essentially sending dirty texts to the mother thinking her the daughter – than is made out.
FICTION: from the Savant Garde: “THE EUPHORIA SCHEDULE”
Endless revolution is the backdrop for the loves and losses of two spies, a lonely Frenchman, the victims of an office romance, intuitive economic theory, a drug-dealer/pimp channeling Abraham Lincoln’s last hour on Earth and a half-Mexican Mata Hari’s exercycle
1. The Euphoria Schedule*
The Revolution will never not be televised- Gil Scott Heron
Jacques A
Visiting North America for a speaking engagement in the 1970s, Derrida began to refer to the TV Guide, a copy of which he’d found on the leather couch in the den of his academic hosts in Ohio, as “The Euphoria Schedule”. He surprised his hosts by becoming an avid watcher of The Dating Game.
Jacques B
*The Money Game is a funny game. The Rules for which are imposed by certain Players. Nothing of Value has an objective value. Values are assigned and all the Players of the Game “agree”. When (eg) the Assigned Value for food is greater than the Assigned Value of the Money held by People X, People X must therefore starve. But why would People X agree to therefore starve? For whether an ounce of gold will purchase a ton of rice or an ounce of rice will purchase a ton of gold, compared to an absolute scale of scientific values, is arbitrary. For even when major currencies are “backed” by precious metals, they are not backed by precious metals (which have no objective value beyond their Assigned Value). They are backed by precious bullets.
I am staring into a strange bedroom with a familiar erection in the twilight.
*Let the record show that Global Recessions are impossible unless the Earth is doing Interplanetary Trade. Because the Money Game is a closed system. The Top of the System is always the top, the Bottom of the System is always the bottom, The Middle is always in flux.
I can hear a stranger showering, through the gap between the window sill and the bottom of her blinds.
*It is all subjective. The Rules of a Game are not a Science.
Io and I had our first real argument because of the revolution. Maybe I was being stupid. I get so stubborn sometimes. She was watching the screen with euphorically teary eyes. After three revolutions in not quite as many months I couldn’t find that one last little half-dram of sincerity in my emotional reserves to spare for it. Instead I made an inappropriate joke. Io asked how could I.
I remember the checkout girl and how I noticed her every time I had a reason to shop at that store until the checkout girl became the reason I shopped at that store. Half-Mexican, possibly. A little dark for a Mexican. Cocoa-brown, I mean. Her actual hair was like a lustrous blue-black wig so heavy on her head but the beauty spot near the right corner of her wide mouth was possibly painted on. I went in pretending to need tape one day and noticed she had a hacking cough and recognized a rare opportunity. I waited in her line, heart gunning, the tape in my longing hands.
The smell of the shower gel follows the sound out of her bathroom and through the bedroom and into my face.
Io stood up from the couch. She wanted to know if I’d been hiding the fact that I’m a cynical jerk all these years. I said all these years strikes me as an exaggeration when you’re talking about three and a half. Up until that moment I hadn’t been mad. I wasn’t pissed until she called me a jerk. Because no one says jerk any more. So the word jerk has regained some force. Most say you prick or motherfucker or cocksucker or cunt. I said oh yeah? I said name the city we’re watching.
“Name it.”
She coughed in her left hand several times as I stood with anticipatory euphoria in her checkout line and this encouraged me. The silver change she handed me was heart-flushingly warm and moist and the next morning I woke very happy in pain just swoon-fevering. The incoherent intensity of the symptoms that had passed from her body to mine was romantic in a way that made me think of the middle ages. It took two weeks of sweating and shitting and vomiting my soul to get back on my feet. When I returned to the store in a brand new jacket she was gone. No record that she had ever worked there or lived in this city.
“Name the fucking city.”
I had crossed a very dangerous line because of course Io couldn’t. She slammed the door on her way out of the room. So I slammed the door on my way out of the flat. I wanted to slam the door on my way out of the city. The country. The dangerous lines kept coming as in a video game. I kept crossing them with mounting senses of satisfaction and despair. Like pulling black teeth with long roots.
Tropical Rainforest comes in a cartoon-like attenuating arm of pale aroma, fingers beckoning. And very faint singing that reminds me of the very faint singing Io would do on the edge of the toilet seat while clipping her toenails.
It was so quiet on the street in front of our building.
What had happened? Why was I outside?
The hiss of her shower chokes off.
I had subliminal expectations of rioting when I exited the foyer in my huff. Brown men throwing exotic bottles at tanks etc. Bottles with necks like hung swans. But I remembered we were not in the third world. I remembered that our poverty is more advanced. It was quiet. Everyone was at home watching the revolution. Twilight saturated the untouched spaces between the arab-brown buildings on our block. I saw the floor lamp click on in our living room window. I would have been happier to see the flat remain dark as I walked away.
*A Science is based on Objective Values (eg, the Gravitational Constant, the structure of DNA, the speed of sound in a fluid, etc). A Game is based on Subjective Pleasures. The Rules of any Complex Game (eg: Economics or Religion) are complex-by-design for purposes of: A) Exclusion, B) Mystification C) Glorified Time-Killing. Simpler Games would make more sense.
Io had been gone on a business trip for five weeks. I had deliberately resisted the temptation to masturbate the final week and a half of her absence. Sexual desperation is money in the bank. Soft hot heirlooms of groin hum in a safety-deposit box guarded by wivestales. Io returned shortly after daybreak in a silver tube out of a pink sky and both of us were exhausted in a way that comes most natural to teens. I’d had a hard-on since roughly fifteen minutes before her plane touched down and the taxi home was one long kiss in a pantomime rape that was by no means unilateral. Or maybe Io would say that I’m flattering myself.
It was a turn-on that Io came back from her business trip with an androgynous haircut and a brand new color. It was like molesting one of the pale-haired boys I tutor in history. Scott or Cody Beyer. We dropped off Io’s luggage a foot inside the front door and locked it up safer than it had been for weeks and went for a hand-holding walk that felt like a second date. We went romantic grocery shopping. We looked anew at new foods Io had previously decided were too expensive.
I am lost in the hopeless fantasy that the shower-taker is the half-Mexican checkout girl and so nostalgic for the fourteen days I carried her fever like a child.
I was unpacking the grocery bags and making covert preparations for a scented bath and a relationship-changing fuck before lunch when Io made the mistake of turning on the television. Io didn’t consider it a mistake. She called me into the living room with sudden excitement.
I tried to maintain a transitory stance between the living room and the bed room but my hard-on ebbed as Io grew more euphorically teary-eyed hugging a couch cushion on the couch her boss had given us.
It’s her! Or someone similar.
2. Checkout Girl
Immediately after the two white men left, YOU THE VIEWER went behind the counter and hefted the phone out of its cubbyhole and up onto the counter beside the register. He began dialing Loop’s out-of-state number. But then he thought better of it and pulled his finger out of the worn hole in the rotary and watched it spin back home, figuring the line was tapped. Dialed up Never instead.
Yo, Mamacita!
Talked for ten minutes about three or four different things of little consequence while Never watched a re-run of Ain’t It The Truth. YOU THE VIEWER could hear the show running its course in the background while Neve Gonzalez said sure and um and really. They watched different episodes and at different times on the West coast so YOU THE VIEWER and Neve could never share the pleasure of a particular episode in real time over the phone together like he could if he’d had anyone that emotionally close in the city to share an episode over the phone with. He pictured her squirting oil in a clear coin on her pink palm with the phone shouldered against her Diana Ross jaw and rubbing the oil into her big round tits as a health regimen. Big and round and black.
New episodes were introduced during prime time on Thursday nights but every weekday you could watch your favorite re-runs of Ain’t It The Truth for most of the afternoon on Channel 8. He wasn’t sure what channel she watched it on out there. Neve would suddenly laugh along with the bigger laughs of the laugh track, the kind of laughs that ended with what sounded like standing ovations, startling YOU THE VIEWER because YOU THE VIEWER couldn’t see Moses in his heart-printed boxers with a bucket of water upended over his head or whatever the gag was. Neve would sort of bark and YOU THE VIEWER would sort of jump and then the cleansing tide of the applause would roll in.
He had an idea for an invention in which a telephone could be hooked up to the television in such a way that the volume on the television would automatically go down whenever one made or received a call. But then he remembered that everyone he knew automatically turned up the volume on the television while taking or making a call… if the cord would reach. He thought about it for awhile and realized that Never was the only one he knew who owned a remote control, the size and weight of a large Crayona box half-full of pennies. He imagined that the white men who had been questioning him had remote-control garage door openers and wood-grain cabin cruisers moored at a segregated dock up north.
YOU THE VIEWER looked out the barred window over the sink in the store room while washing his hands, counting the cars in the lot, making sure the number was no more than ten, ten cars in the lot, and then he dried his hands on his apron, like he always did, and hung the apron on the nail beside the safe, like he always did, and kicked off the crepe-soled clogs he’d gotten from Never. He slipped with a wince into his Hush Puppies, bad leg first, weight on his elbow on the edge of the safe. Like he always did.
There was an unmediated aggression of the leaves against the sun and the definition of the surfaces the sunlight struck and its pressure on his face and hands that reminded him of unprepared-for mornings after long nights of emotional trauma and zero sleep. In a word: youth. His disorientation reminded him of youth but he no longer indulged, so why was his head so out there today? The aged ripe odors of summer hit him strong and so romantic. This is the way that Lincoln must have felt on the way to the theater, he thought, but, then he thought, what a thing to think, what am I thinking? Where did that come from? Done gone crazy and back.
Had a vision of Abraham pausing to sensually grip that cool brass handle on his carriage like it was the first one he’d ever really gripped and then smoothing the plush of the long seat in the curtained ambiance in the back of the carriage with the sensual cognition of a character out of DH Lawrence. Last couple of hours on Earth.
Saw his reflection balloon across the chrome of the mount of the driver-side rearview like something going to bite him and he flinched from his own reaching hand. Maybe it’s food poisoning. Maybe he’d been getting sloppy about washing up (alcohol rub w/ cotton pads, Phisohex, blow-dry hot) after trips upstairs to handle the product. The meticulous responsibilities of maintenance in an unusual context. The last thing you need to do is jeopardize the goose and her golden eggs with half-ass sloppy.
He was all the way to the intersection of Alton and Waycock, easing behind an I-Haul displaying a kid’s half-scraped Wondermen decal over a Nixon bumpersticker when it hit him why ten was an error. It should not be ten, ten cars in the lot. Because of the Bigelows. Marilyn Bigelow in a Woolworths wig. See the Bigelows were down-state for all of September since the crack yesterday morning therefore the number of cars in the lot behind 6560 North Grant should only be nine. Which could mean the hassle of calling a tow truck in the morning. And some surly brother in his face about it. Yeah, well I’d really rather not, thanks, thought YOU THE VIEWER. Let Loop handle it when he gets back. Let the brother earn his cut.
Oh hell yeah. Delia Peacock singing Fornever After. Good station. Strong signal. Sang the chorus along and to YOU THE VIEWER’s chocolate ear it rang real beautiful. Even a tear in his eye. What is this shit, he thought, kind of laughing, embarrassed in front of himself and back-handing the tear gently. Male menopause?
An old white lady in a blue U-Boat of a Cadillac at the next light on his right snapped her face his way as though she could hear him through all the layers of glass and air conditioning until he realized he wasn’t only singing the chorus but gesturing it, too. Delia sang saviors to my left and lovers to my right and YOU THE VIEWER had pointed melodramatically right, on cue, and the white lady bodily assumed YOU THE VIEWER was pointing a piece and ducked. He could see how his big black pointing finger might look, for a second, to a white lady, like the barrel of a gun.
Madam I suggest you best never get a load of a Negro excited dick.
There was the half-built church (construction halted for lack of funds) and the dilapidated piss cinema on the corner and the 5-an-Dime in the middle of a block losing tenants left and right. The 5-an-Dime was a fluorescent set of uppers in the middle of an otherwise rotten smile. The lights were going on earlier and earlier every day. Goodbye summer. He guided the Mercury to a perfect place of rest and discovered, to his delight, that there was five minutes left on the meter. Making an undeclared fifty-grand a month and got the nerve to relish saving a fucking quarter. Whoo-hee.
Let’s see now. Housewares or gardening. Ever notice the ratio of ladies to gentlemen in the 5-an-Dime is roughly similar to night school typing class?
Heavy duty ten-gallon buckets. How did Loop come by those in bulk in the first place? Her piss must be full of some kind of acid substance which leached the plastic of vital elasticity because all the buckets got so brittle and started cracking so fast. Imagine what that shit must do to your dick. Buckets w/lids even better for a change but never seen such a thing but wait hold on what I really want is a hardware store. If anyone uses ten-gallon plastic goddamn buckets with lids it’s house painters. And here I am standing in front of the Tupperware. One aisle over from Tampax. What’s wrong with me today?
Those white men, obviously.
YOU THE VIEWER was a linguistic aficionado of state and federal stylings but these guys were definitely not in the general codex. Even scarier: one of them (the tall one, chewing nicotine chiclets) had spoken with the imperfectly-suppressed German accent. Grown men wearing black baseball caps and identical mustaches and Hai Karate aftershave interrogating him in his own office.
Out on the twilit sidewalk with a neat little red and white bag of miscellaneous bullshit such as paperclips, multicolored push-pins and a stack of Dixie Cup refills he’d felt obligated to purchase for reasons he is not entirely conversant with he looked up to see the twilight saturating the untouched spaces between the arab-brown buildings on the block.
The premise of Ain’t It The Truth as follows. Moses Stone (Godfrey Cambridge) is a government agent captured and given an experimental truth serum by Moldavian spies. Moses is rescued from the Moldavians before spilling sensitive information and retires from the field but the effects of the truth serum can’t be reversed: he finds himself incapable of lying. We follow the trials and tribulations of a decommissioned government agent forced to re-integrate into the workaday world but who hasn’t the ordinary option, for example, of answering his girlfriend untruthfully when she asks if her new bikini makes her look fat. Mr. Platt, who speaks with a mildly British accent (and is played by the veteran character actor Oliver Dunn, famous for his role as the upper-class husband of a gorgeous hillbilly in the Broadway play Kissin’ Cozzens) is Moses Stone’s former control, whose task it is to make sure that Stone’s inability to lie never compromises national security. The physical comedy of Aint It The Truth involves Mr. Platt variously tipping over priceless vases, triggering fire alarms, stuffing socks, cheeseburgers or sleeping pills into Stone’s mouth and otherwise creating effective silences or diversions right in the nick of time.
Herzog enjoyed cleaning his weapon while watching the show.
He sat on the edge of the motel bed while Fordy sat propped against the headboard chewing Copenhagen with his shoes on unlaced asking Herzog to move to the left every few minutes, jerking his gun-cleaning arm. They belonged to a venerable tradition of Mutt-n-Jeff teams of Law Enforcement both covert and explicit which a company shrink had once explained to Ford, taking him aside at a social function, as a subconscious improvement on marriage, with the twist that the shorter of the two men tended to be the “husband”. This had given Ford no small secret satisfaction despite the fact that he sometimes suspected the company shrink had also taken Herzog aside and explained the same thing but with the husband-role reversed in order to flatter Herzog. Every few minutes, after asking Herzog to move to the left, Ford bent to the side and spit some Cope quite daintily into a Dixie Cup he’d fished out of the waste basket in the bathroom for that purpose and also to collect his toenails.
What you get in a motel room that you can never get at home is the invigorating woosh of the highway, the sound-effect of things are happening. Progress is alive and well, the American century careens at full tilt toward distant points on the horizon. Sit on the edge of your Comfo-Rest in the wedding-cake bedroom community which the profession affords you and you lose all sense of this movement and it is a palpable sensation of steps backward and things in vain. It’s like the Dead Sea out there or the Doldrums and even the motion-box of the Television doesn’t provide enough of the illusion of movement to keep a man from resorting to the bottle for the bottle’s built-in tilt. Ford was not an alcoholic for the very reason that his job kept him in motel rooms.
Ford had come to the conclusion that the problem of marriage was this division of the genders along the eternal theme of motion. Men prefer more of it and women prefer less of it and this is where society and physics intersect in the form of an engineering problem only slightly solved by the motion-box and family vacations. Dot and the kids and their impatience to get there versus Ford’s male dread of parking and its aftermath. Family vacations would be great if you just drove the whole time and ate for three days at nine different Howard Johnson’s and came home and they unpacked the station wagon while you sat in your seat with the motor running. Ford wondered if there were accurate statistics comparing the divorce-rates of single-family dwellings within hearing-distance of highways versus those in which the man could hear nothing.
Ford was nursing a dangerous little glow of philosophical anger within his breast. It’s like you have to criticize a thing before you can kill it. It had started that very afternoon. He hoped to fucking Jehovah it wasn’t love. How can an Anglo-Saxon agent love a half-Mexican dissident seeding revolutions like some sort of mongrel typhoid Mary? He leaned and spit some Cope into the Dixie Cup as daintily as a conservationist releasing endangered species from the tip of his tongue into a living stream and said,
“Duke.”
And Herzog moved to the left.
A modest house on a hill with its back to the freeway. One retired neighbor in his drive with a gas-powered plane on a tether was doing circles, another washing storms. The storm-washer’s wife handed them down from the top of a ladder, one by one. The rest of the wide street was quiet.
How could a mere checkout girl possibly afford to live here?
Neve Gonzalez was blinds-drawn masturbating on her Kineti-Cycle in her lustrous veil of blue-black hair, hazel eyes on Godfrey Cambridge, hump-grinding the quality leather of the saddle, working her lather in the grain by the nether-light of the noon she’d locked out of the room for this purpose. The seams between the slats of the blinds were ingot-hot. She gripped the grips on the handlebars and pedaled through the sweat.
The odometer made the amazing claim that she’d done seven miles since the beginning of the episode and two of those since the commercial break alone and she saw the Liquid Prell and the descent of its pearl as though it were an animated billboard she’d glided by completely unimpressed. Just a little tired of pretending to be impressed by artificial white women. The white women she knew had spider veins and corns and farted on the way out of the elevator. Neve’s tresses were ravens’ wings in her peripheral vision and she rose at speed on a steep road out of the raven-haunted woods of her fantasy towards the bright black moon of Godfrey’s vaselined face. They literally vaselined his face to make it shine in the studio lights to provide this powerful impression. The Nielsen figures were off the charts. Never was coming and coming still in rapid vulval-cream-lubricated alternations of very high left and right knee. ¡Viva la Revolución!
California was pouring its free gold through living room windows when Gonzalez emerged from the bedroom. She could still smell the Hai Karate ghost of the men who had stood in this very spot with their cheapo note pads eliciting dictation from her. She was thinking how everything is a matter of the proper sequence. Civilization depends on it. The men with the notepads leave the premises and then you beat off. You commute to the firing range and the cardboard cutout swings into view on its hook and only then do you shoot. Think of all the calamities that befall us, she thought, though not in so many words, when we fuck our sequences up.
mediocre music but great vid (raiding Jodorowsky)
mediocre music but great vid (raiding Fantastic Planet)
Back By Popular Request:
The guy who does sound for our shows has a fantastic vinyl LP from the 50′s of how to teach your parrot to speak. It’s 30 minutes of a BBC voiced gentleman saying ” Who’s a pretty boy” on one side and …. errrr…. and…… I can’t actually remember what the other side said. The idea being you put it on, go out and when you return the parrot can talk to you … or kill you.
Ken Campbell the late, great monologuist and theatre-maker taught his parrot to say ” I used to be an egg”.
Just finished Libra – I really must thank you for bringing Don De Lillo to my attention. A revelation. I thought the ending of Libra – the mother’s elegy for Lee was an extraordinary bit of writing. Not what you’d expect at all.
Comrade ET:
Yeah, Libra is another masterpiece. I can only hope that when Donnie D claimed to actually believe (in real life) that Ossie was the lone shooter, he was being sarcastic. Or a chickenshit. Because the book was so much smarter than a belief of that crimped nature could contain!
Re: Campbell’s parrot (in the pantheon with Schroedinger’s Cat and Maxwell’s Demon): self-aware repetition was its enlightened form of mind control
THE PEOPLE’S COMMENT THREAD VERSE
OH DEAR: SILLY WOGS CLAMORING FOR THE REPATRIATION OF SOME OF OUR IMPERIAL TROPHIES AGAIN
Get a big enough army, Ertugrul , and you can loot antiquities and arrogantly refuse to give them back, too!
TET T-SHIRT GIVEAWAY OF THE MONTH
“MENTAL MASTURBATION
GRASPING AT THIN AIR”
is my best shot
Just need a dozen more of these and we have a virtual cottage industry on our (ahem) hands, Comrade DJ Sensei ET!
Meanwhile, let’s lighten up for two minutes and thirty seconds:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfLtyJAASfc&feature=player_embedded#at=69
RNDM MISC NOTES #5 or 6
(to be added-to continuously)
1. Ambition makes cowards of us all
2. Predictions are wishes
3. Can’t make a bloody omelet without some blood
4. The best way to control the opposition is to hire it
5. Distrust Your Buzz
6.
7. “Reality TV”: the flagship oxymoron of our epoch
8. “Stop Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”: Because We Need A Politically Correct Murder Machine
9. Hypernomics: Buying the world with the interest earned on owning it
10. Deviant Psychotopology: The Hollow Insider mistakes being Inside for having Inside
11.
12. Success is an STD
13. Equal Opportunity Superiority
14. “we’re reaching the point where commodities outnumber ideas by such a ratio that just putting two or three commodities next to each other will now have to stand for an idea”
15. Young people like young poems, middle-aged people like middle-aged poems and old people like young poems.
16. People use the word “Bloggers” the way one might say “Cookers”. There are gifted chefs and there are face-stuffing slobs capable of burning (and then eating) a discount frozen pizza every evening. What kind of cunt addresses both ends of that spectrum in one utterance?
17. art is that which could not be mistaken for anything else
18. Argument is architecture; you can’t demolish a well-made building by defacing it with silly graffiti or knocking a few roof tiles off of it
19. Why isn’t Xmas called Tmas?
20.
21.
22. Philosophers write as though they are charging by the hour; Americans read as though they are paying by the minute
23. Sex is the only activity during which sexism is impossible
24. In Sci Fi and Porno, how the characters are doing what they’re doing is more important than why they’re doing it, and what they’re doing it with is the most important of all
25. Pain is Evolution’s way of keeping us from eating ourselves
26. Infinite compassion requires infinitesimal status
27.
28. The perceptive literary critique is psychoanalysis which transcends the goal of therapy (and vice versa)
29. Re: “Shock and Awe”… remember when they called it “Blitzkrieg”?
30. There are fewer things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio…
31. How can one possibly conceive a love for the greater mass of humanity without first seeing it as toddlers?
32. Men have abused women just as women have abused children just as the rich have abused the poor and the vital have abused the decrepit… it was never a matter of gender or class but of species. Or phylum. It’s not really Racism or Sexism or Ageism or Lookism or Classism or Nationalism: it’s Powerism.
Beyond the beyond… let’s post it again:
Oh, Christ…I love Nina Simone but that fucking song epitomises everything I loathe about 3rd-rate musical hackery and cheap sentimentality…of course, she knows it only too well: how could an artist as sensitive to nuance as NS not? Mind you, watching her visceral disgust for this over-ripe, sub-sub-Brill Building tripe is an instructive delight.
[ed.'s note: wait, M... didn't the 2 Neils (the Sedaka-Diamond virus) punch the clock at the Brill? If so, can we revise "sub sub" to "sub"...?]
It’s one of the most creative breakdowns ever recorded and well worth whatever the ticket price was, I’m sure… she comes *this* close to killing most of the front row (starting with the ones who were ready to enjoy a straight rendition of “Feelings”); and I esp. like the very strange, bold and rageful song she begins to improv-channel near the end
It’s a kind of Newtonian equation that when things go seriously wrong on stage they last longer than they do in the “real” world.
A friend of mine witnessed a complete nervous breakdown on stage by 60′s chanteuse Kathy Kirby in the 80′s. It was a benefit gig for a youth centre – she was a friend/ ex-lover of the woman who ran the place so did it as a favour. A massive mistake for all concerned apparently.
The verdict on the death of reggae star Smiley Culture was that he stabbed himself in the heart when the police raided his house. Who commits suicide by stabbing themselves?
“Who commits suicide by stabbing themselves?”
Erm… David Kelly?
well exactly.
Death with a knife would be slitting your throat or wrists. Very quick apparently. Not sticking it in between your ribs in the hope it hits your heart.
1. You know, of course, I was being snarkastic about Kelly, Comrade ET… it’s clear the bastards had every reason to off him. And the number of people who suddenly “kill” themselves when surrounded by coppers is worth a paranoid’s wink, too. I also like the “suicide by double-gunshot” joke (and it really does appear on coroner’s reports from time to time)*
2. “A friend of mine witnessed a complete nervous breakdown on stage by 60′s chanteuse Kathy Kirby in the 80′s. It was a benefit gig for a youth centre – she was a friend/ ex-lover of the woman who ran the place so did it as a favour…”
B.Y.T. (Before YouTube), sadly!
* back to the topic of the suicided:
According to the story in The Indy, Mr. Culture asked the invading officers if he could go in the kitchen and make a cup of tea. Evidently, he decided that tea wasn’t going to cut it and decided to stab himself in the chest instead…as one does. Perhaps if he’d opted for coffee, this might never have happened.
Mr. Culture knew something extremely dangerous, M… (apparently, he said something about “Grassy Noel” or somesuch in a frantic whispered phone call before boarding the Moribund Express)…
There’s a long list at the end of a book about Steve Biko of “suicides” in custody.
One prisoner killed himself by falling out of bed.
[ed.'s note: M! You forgot! The DATE, M! The DATE!*]
*[September 11th, 1973]
The best bit of that overlong marathon blub-fest of a film Magnolia is the beginning bit.
A man commits suicide by jumping off a building. As he falls he’s hit by a bullet fired during a marital tiff in a room on floor 5 so dies before he hits the ground.
The end frog-storm is good too but there’s an awful lot between it.
Christ you feckers are morbid! Don’t you know this is a
CAT BLOG
(the pictures of cats doing cute things are implied)?
ET, that Magnolia sequence was probably inspired by this Urbane Legend:
I say “Urbane Legend” because it started as a joke at an awards dinner:
( hangs head in shame ) SA I tried re-writing the suicide comments substituting cat names for the human ones in order to conform with the latest TET cat blog strictures.
Unfortunately they made marginally less sense than the police’s explanations for the suicides.
But in terms of making sense it was THAT close.
I see Tiddles, Madame Fou Fou and Herbie are ready to invade Libya. Authorised by Pet Rescue and the Dog Whisperer as well ( is this sort of thing you’re after?)
[ed.'s note: that's the spirit! Nice picture (just play along) too!]
(Makes Ken Loach and Mike Leigh look like Billy Wilder)
When the “low-key” social realism bores the makers of this I assume there will be an “Angry Grandpa goes on a shooting spree” clip in the pipeline.
I’m ambivalent about Ken Loach – mainly because the world depicted in Riff-Raff was right outside the door of the workshop we rented for 20 years so I never felt the need to see a fictionalised version.
The makers of this were his chubby son with a cheap camera and daily forced access, ET! This is that “corner” of America that represents about 40% of the actual population and about 1% of its Media Fantasies.
The first four or five are gems of foul despair; it’s not long before video infamy obviously softens Granpa Grendel, however, and self-consciousness mediates the presentation. But the ones where he flings the burning grill around the yard or hires a charlatan (for 150 bucks) to rid himself of “The Hag” (the malevolent spirit he believes sits on his chest, while he sleeps, to suck his breath out)… are Arbus-meets-Bosch-with-sprinkles-of-Peckinpah masterpieces. I have skirted the peripheries of the orbits around self-decapitating ragers like that during my blue-collar American dreamlife and the experience was usually funny-horrific in much the same way…
I think I was under no illusion that this was a professional job but having met a few film-crews who talked the talk and walked the walk but who were some blokes with a camera it’s becoming difficult to tell. One “crew” wanted us to stage parts of a show again so they could shoot close-ups and reaction shots.
Given that everything is on YouTube the lines are becoming further blurred.
Especially with the hand-held camera, no laughter-track, day-in-the-life-of documentary being quite a fashionable style.
A real shift of thinking. With my mum dying we looked at a few home movies. They were made for personal pleasure/documentation, I suppose if we made them now rather than 50 years ago they’d be straight on YouTube rather than shown at Xmas with the doors locked so the elder children can’t escape.
I suppose our attitude was different because the film had to be sent away and there was no guarantee it would come out as we imagined it would. Digital cameras with the instant results ( in theory ) allow you to think far more formally about how you film things. Having said that there is an astonishing amount of footage of the camera pointed at the ground as the camera-person.
God I sound old. Are there some quills that need sharpening?
Not only do I sound old I’m forgetting to finish my sentences. I’m 53 [ed.'s note: one foot in the grave and the other on an ice floe! I'm a young and hip 52, ye olde feck! Clear the way, Antediluvian!] you know!
Rewind end of penultimate paragraph
Having said that there is an astonishing amount of footage of the camera pointed at the ground as the camera-person forgets to switch the camera off and moves to the next filmable scene
Re: Future Shock and how the modern camera figures in it: my concept of my own childhood (which is anchored by perhaps a dozen curling snapshots, a third of which are faded Kodachrome and the rest stark b&w) is very different from how my 5-year-old daughter’s will be, as she already has a folder of about 1 Gig worth of fotos she’s taken with her own digital camera, not to mention the 400 Gigs (not exaggerating) of films and pictures we’re archiving, having started months before her birth. She will have a pretty accurate sense of her actual childhood, whereas my childhood changes according to the era I’m thinking back on it from and is largely a mood-contingent fabrication, I’m sure.
Even more astonishing: I didn’t get a digital camera until 2003 or so! Before that, the late-90s are represented by nude Polaroids of my first (satanic) wife plus stray rolls (which were digitized as an added service) from disposable cameras. Nothing from 1991-1996; one picture from 1990; a handful from London; some professional band promo shots from ’85 and then ’87…. nothing from college… one yearbook photo from High School….
Kids with my daughter’s birth year are of the most thoroughly documented and publicized (and surveilled ) generation in history. That has to have a psycho-social impact. Time (and revolution?) will tell, Comrade ET.
Related, somehow: my daughter just lurched into the room complaining that her right wrist is hurting. I explained it’s owing to over-use of her mouse.
There are 2 pictures of me until I was about 5.
I initially thought this lack of camera-coverage was because my father had tired of photographing my 3 elder brothers when young but discovering much later that I was the result of an affair my mother had explained the reluctance of the photographer.
I find those kinds of photos almost unbearable to look at ( not because of embarassment but … I’m not sure exactly why, the context in which they were taken I think ) so it’s just as well there are hardly any of them.
[ed.'s note: at least you can be reasonably sure that your bio-Dad isn't Martin Amis or Ted Nugent]
Comrade ET, you will inevitably hit the bigtime as an Artiste when you reach the correct age (70 feels retrospectiveable)… and your picture-perfect Bohemian Autobiography will snap right into place!
when I need to fabricate parts of my undocumented early years I will consult you for some unexpected avenues and possibilities.
After all there’s no point inventing something prosaic.
[ed.'s note: My daughter will be a master of HoloMorph 3.0 by then, ET... she'll knock something real spiffy up for you... for a mere few million Global Credits...]
Ouch!
Unless she’s prepared to negotiate I may have to go to the Angry Grandpa.
Readers of my autobiography will be surprised at the sudden bursts of swearing and rage against grills that I exhibit in the Unphotographed years but the sudden ( almost violent ) change of temperament when I finally start to appear on photographs could be the book’s selling point.
[ed.'s Input: "ANGRY ET" so much sexier...!]
“at least you can be reasonably sure that your bio-Dad isn’t Martin Amis or Ted Nugent”
Ted’s a wild man but he would have had to have reached puberty aged 7 in order to sire me. As he doesn’t appear to have matured yet aged 62 we can cross him off the list.
A bit of a relief actually as much as I like “Journey to the Centre of the Mind”.
I’m reading Things by George Perec. written in 1965 it’s basically a more dispassionate version of those anti-hipster websites that crop up.
It’s a series of lists cunningly disguised as prose – I’m half way through and it has a momentum which suggests it will develop beyond that. Though i wouldn’t be too disappointed if it continues as it started. And by lists I don’t mean those horrendous Nick Hornby lists.
Why am I telling you this? I don’t know – probably to keep my mind off the news that the UK are bombing Libya now.
The Perec sounds interesting, Comrade DJ Sensei ET… I’ll have to try to find a copy (though, to be fair, the hipsters Perec had in his sights wouldn’t have deserved it nearly as much as their spiritually-hollowed-out godchildren do).
Re: the Anglophone Hegemony bombing the fuck out of yet another oil-rich territory: it’s funny how low the threshold for triggering cries of “regime change!” in the west is… when it comes to oil-rich territories of the orient. Get 1,000 people marching in a square for a week and The People have spoken, as far as we’re concerned… unless it’s in fucking Wisconsin or in front of Buckingham Palace. Shouldn’t a country get to put it to a vote, whether they want to be bombed to pre-Stoneage-amenities-level or not? Not that the Nazis ever considered the dreams and wishes of a targeted nation before Blitzkrieging… well the Nazis were fucking rude, weren’t they? You see what I’m getting at.
Perec isn’t venomous but life is marked out by the things people own – in this case a Sunday Times colour supplement lifestyle.
So the character’s personalities have no more weight than the descriptions of the things they own or aspire to own. He could well twist the knife but it also might be stronger if he remains descriptive. His membership of OuLiPo suggests the latter.
It’s the mixing of oil with “humanitarianism” that sticks in the craw. Gaddafi is a blatantly unpleasant individual but so is Mugabe who starved his country, ran its economy into the ground whilst lavishing wealth on his inner circle, refused to give up power against the wishes of the voters and all manner of other rudenesses.
Yet no call for regime change, no setting up of no-fly zones, nothing bar the flimsiest of protest from the UK government is even considered.
“It’s the mixing of oil with “humanitarianism” that sticks in the craw.”
New word for the Fictionary?
Oleotarianism
I didn’t know Jeff Koons had been commissioned to commemorate the latest attempt to boost the country’s morale in austere times by subsidizing the marriage of a couple who have already got a lot of our money.
William appears to be morphing into Matthew McConnaghey – the well-known spelling mistake ( joke courtesy of Spike Milligan ).
Buries nose even deeper in the Perec book.
A bit matte (and/or boob-free) for a Koons, though, no? (closer to Spitting Image) I like A) how the best-laid-publicity-plans of royals and mere men couldn’t keep the groom from losing his hair before the big day and B) how almost every photo of the fella crops the shining top discreetly, as if we don’t already know.
I am slightly shocked that royal fever seems to be taking off in the North American colonies again (shades of Di, herself a shade). Remember back in 2004 when the Guardian (or something similar) started a well-meaning mass-letter-writing campaign, from ordinary Brits to ordinary Yanks, in an effort to export sweet reason, in the friendliest tones, pleading with Yanks not to vote for GW again? And nearly every response from the Yanks had something to do with teeth?
re: Koons I was thinking more of the sentiments of those carved wooden Bavarian bears or the giant Pluto hugging a policeman ( or something, can’t quite remember, I’m 53 etc. etc. ) rather than a polychrome recreation of La Ciccolina’s anus.
The British book of Dentistry was a gag in the Simpsons to encourage Bart and Lisa to visit the dentist by horrifying them with results of those that didn’t..
There’s a Powell & Pressburger double bill on this afternoon. Terribly British ( I’ll check the dentistry and report back ) but there’s something rather extraordinary about them as well which lifts the films out of the cut-glass accented middle-classness of it all.
THE TRASHY TET RADIO SHOW OVERSHARE #2
PLEASE TAKE ONE
PLEASE TAKE ANOTHER
YET ANOTHER
They Are Trashy… You’ll Like Them
[ed.'s note: kids, remember to get permission from your parents or your professors before downloading!]
CROSS-TOWN Walk -or- ELEGY FOR AN AFFORDABLE STUDIO SPACE
Long walk with Comrade DJ Sensei JR this afternoon in the chilly sun. The point is to enjoy the sun before the summer heat comes back and brings the odor of dogshit and garlic breath to a sultry boil. The natives I know (with the dainty exception of Beloved and one or two others) don’t know what I mean when I say these things; they’re largely immune to the violence of foul public odors, weirdly, while also being generally germophobic: it’s not uncommon to see Berliners quite happily attending a meal at a sidewalk cafe in whiffing-range of a sewer, oblivious to the ambiance of municipal bowel… but just watch one flinch at a handshake. I’ve seen Germans glare their way through the extreme nearness of a beggar who smelled like fresh shit on a burst corpse rather than give up a seat on the U-Bahn to change wagons. I have never once seen Turkish passengers do this; they pinch their noses and run, laughing or cursing. It’s my policy to exit a stinking train without inner-debate.
Comrade JR is losing the unspoken lease on his studio this week; a fashion label from London is taking over the entire floor of the ex-piano-factory for 120X the rent that he once paid for his nice little corner room with a view of the courtyard. We’ve seen booms and busts here but in twenty years, it seems, the dirty little secret of the absurd affordability of this city has finally leaked to the wrong ears. The cool days are definitely over now; all we can do is make the most of the quasi-amnesties of transition. The new airport (direct flights from here to terrible places like NY) will mark the terrible end. Reminds me of the dramatic E-major closing “A Day in the Life”. Or the gist of “Five Years” from the Ziggy Stardust album. But I think it’s closer to three than five, Zig. Smiling and waving and looking so fine, indeed.
Comrade JR was at a fancy dinner party with his Beloved this weekend, a party hosted by one of Germany’s great auteurs of the New Wave, and the guests were actually talking about Derrida and Adorno at the table… which struck me as unbelievable until I remembered that the guests were German. American academics would have been talking politics (gingerly), or they would have leavened some fancy theoretical talk with plebby pop references, or even centered some loose chat on interrogating GaGa’s Queerisms; Americans would have considered unadulterated talk about Adorno and Derrida at a dinner table to be pretentious and embarrassing (unless they were students, but they weren’t: they were grownups, in the range of 40-to-late-’50s). Comrade JR reports that the auteur diffused this cloud of twaddle with an expertly-placed joke and I was reassured: I like the man’s work, which makes me want to like the man, which is the charisma-driven reality of the Arts. The auteur is a very tall, good-looking, extremely intelligent fucker of c. 60.
After the dinner, JR told me, he and his Beloved mounted their bikes in the early hours and peddled, slightly tipsy, across a couple of neighborhoods, home. The other guests (architects, curators, etc) drove to their status-bunkers in their status-panzers but JR and his delicate little inamorata rode the romantically abandoned streets on wobbly bicycles against the fresh black Berlin wind. I was moved when he told me how guilty he suddenly felt that his Beloved was on a wobbly bike in the cold instead of what the pretentious bitch who had dropped Derrida on dinner was riding in at that very moment. But his Beloved was exhilarated out there on the empty streets with him, peddling hard and singing at the top of her lungs. From a distance (and not much of one) she looks about 15 to JR’s illusion-of-distance-conferred 27. I romanticize my friends (and dramatize my enemies and ironize myself ).
JR didn’t say so but I assume they fucked like Miles-loving Bohemian Gods in their huge Bohemian flat, (complete with a home cinema, with a wall-sized treated-linen screen and weird Korean teas) when they finally made it home. Adorno, Hegel, Benjamin… there’s no way you’ll convince me these poor fuckers had excellent sex lives. As animals these counterfeit immortals were tragic failures. Their respective opuses are glorified suicide notes. I think of classical German culture, in general, as a suicide note/last-will-and-testament, actually… and of American culture as a ransom note.
Where was I?
Comrade DJ JR and I parted ways after a two-hour walk but I still had an hour of walking ahead of me. Not ten minutes after waving goodbye I came across this graffito, from an American student-tourist (obviously):
Which was the dumbest thing I’d read all afternoon. And so tragically, delusionally, American. For, as it happens, 99.99999999999999999999% of the Universe is so hostile to human life (and biological existence in general) that it will flash-freeze, vaporize, dissolve, suffocate, dismember, or neutron-strip you on contact. Synchronistically, I then found, in my Facebook, after making it to the airy flat my family and I use for protection against the mind-boggling caprices of the Universe, a link to the following, on the topic of the Japanese earthquake, from a Yankee expat who barely escaped death in the crisis:
I immediately forwarded the excerpt, along with the following comment, in an email to JR (I hadn’t even removed my walking boots yet):
No, you stupid cunt, it was a really big earthquake, which caused a tsunami, and this was not the Earth’s wise way of enlightening humanity; it was an insentient fucking geological process which, incidentally, crippled or killed thousands of unlucky people whose friends and relatives don’t feel cosmic as a result of the catastrophe. If there had been any intentional lesson for you in all this, a building would’ve collapsed on your insufferably simple-minded, egocentric American ass.
The nice thing being that I knew that JR would agree.
[ed.'s note: the last picture in the sequence above is the display window of a Funeral Parlor. That's Berlin, folks.]
THE COMMENT ABROAD
[exchange the active verb in the photo for "read"; as ever, most images on this site are stolen from HERE]
This started as a response to an interview with Tantra Besko at HTMLGIANT; the link was posted on Facebook by Comrade DJ Sensei Edmond Caldwell, I read it and commented. Comrade Edmond commented (back on Facebook) and I tied my final Facebook response to a train of thought I had after waking this morning:
*
*
*
*
This last notion deserves expansion.
[the junior writer, sans glasses, and his wife]
Over at Dan’s (where I’m so non-grata that he refuses to respond to my comments anymore, apparently; oh hissy hissy fit!), I responded to a post about the innocuous Nicole Krauss’ jejune soporifique re: bookstores:
Etc.
my comment:
People who make a point of bashing the Web for all the bullshit it carries… as though the bullshit is the Web’s defining characteristic… are under-read and/or naive cunts who obviously believe that Fox, CNN, the NYT and the propaganda-lurid “history” books they “studied” in school are lucid, objective, fact-encrusted visions of Truth&Reason. Again, the warning against knowledge in The Christian Manifesto’s paradise parable is obviously quite effective.
It’s niggling the shit out of me, btw, that I meant to write herecomeseverybody-ness, in that comment, but posted herecomeseveryone-ness instead. A genuinely writerly niggle.
My home laptop gets emails but can’t send them at the moment I’m not in the workshop til Monday so a kwik reply to your position in the Coalition of the Unwilling.
Yikes!
It’s one thing to tilt at the publishing industry and its many skewed practises but nailing your colours to the Jacqueline Howett mast seems a particularly barmy way to go about it. Rather like designing a cannon that fires backwards.
Erm… not that anyone should misinterpret the ambiguity of your comment in such a way as to think I think that illiterate fucking Howett dilettante (dilliteratante?) is anything but, Comrade ET…! (larf)
Not one of my better phrased comments it must be admitted though I did like the cannon firing backwards bit. Perhaps it distracted me. Perhaps I’ve got Howettheria and my grammar has become corrupted. You snake etc. etc.
Oh, it was perfectly-phrased, ET… just a little like one of those situations in which the viewers at home can’t hear the other side of the phone call; or, no: better: once I was strolling along a crowded sidewalk with an acquaintance who was caught up in relating the basest perfidy of a lady what done him wrong… dramatizing the tale in an unfortunately-formulated second-person narration, eg: “I BUY YOU NICE CLOTHES AND EXPENSIVE JEWELRY AND YOU PAY ME BACK BY SUCKING SOMEONE ELSE’S DAMN… etc. etc.
IS THIS HOW MARSHALL APPLEWHITE GOT HIS START?
I just vomited last week’s latte, some echinacea from 2002 and a fifty-pound hairball from thirty-five years of my feminist sex technique. Now, I was a soft-spoken legacy-metrosexual before I watched this abomination (posted on Facebook by a woman I immediately deleted as a result)… but now I have this terrible urge to chew tobacco, fart on a Yogini and punch a very old cat…
THE COMMENT ABROAD meets THE WAR AGAINST THE WAR AGAINST TALENT
Carol Duffy has tossed off more shitty verse and someone in the comment thread of the blodg where the shitty verse was posted (breathlessly) linked to something by the equally-cryptically-talented Wendy Cope; something up at the Guardian having to do with a “poet’s” sacred right to protect her profoundly-unasked-for-efforts on a legal basis.
My resultant comment is “in moderation” (that’s Latin for “you’re not going to rain on our parade, bucko!”) but, owing to the wonders of having one’s own fucking blog, is reproduced, miraculously, here:
It’s not the free ice cream I’m complaining about (though, as I’ve put it elsewhere, if the free ice cream tastes like vomit…); it’s all the fuckers out there driving counterfeit ice cream trucks.
A sample of Duffy’s squitter (the blodger who reproduces Duffy’s squitter on her page introduces it with “Anyway here it is – properly angry, immensely clever, entirely brilliant. What a woman, and what a poet”…) :
and
and
All in protest of British Arts Council Cuts. Which is a little like protesting a headmaster’s sacking with a photo showing his dick out. No?
PS Wendy Cope is extremely anxious that material such as the following is being freely distributed on The Internet, with no profit to Wendy Cope:
Ironic that it’s Larkin we have to blame for it.
THIS ISN’T TWEE BOURGEOIS EXISTENTIALISM aka *POMES WE LIKE BUT DIDN’T WRITE*
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE NO. 1
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
is sharing a bathroom with my sister
he seems to find this situation less than ideal
I FIND THIS SITUATION LESS THAN IDEAL
is written with a fountain pen on a parchment scroll
a seal of amber wax
at the foot of my bed
PLEASE INFORM YOUR SIBLING
THAT HER SUNDRY ITEMS CONTINUE
TO INFRINGE UPON MY SIDE OF
THE BATHCHAMBER DESPITE
THE EQUAL DIVISION
OF THE SPACE I HAVE VERY CAREFULLY
DEMARCATED
my sister is in her room listening to Joy Division
and reading a magazine segment concerned with
the ‘flirty’ application of eye-liner
that guy
takes a really long time in the bathroom
my sister tells me
I don’t know what the fuck he is doing
in there.
I explain that he has fingernails to buff
a velvet waistcoat to de-lint
a cravat to tie
starched knickers to fasten
a wig to powder
I didn’t know that was a wig
she says, an abrupt musical shift to Justice
I had assumed that was
his real hair.
—Kristin Hayter
The immortal Bruno S. as filmed/edited by an old Comrade of mine:
“The Art knows more than the Artist does; the Art just is but the Artist was.”
–Ann Ominous
THIS via HTMLGIANT (sort of) proving it’s not just a good place to slap around the lame, the halt and the jejune
THE BEST WAY TO DESTROY THE OPPOSITION IS TO HIRE IT
1.
The extent to which “educated” Americans are parroting anti-Qaddafi propaganda is an infernally-glowing product-testimonial to how powerful our Yankee brainwashing is: exactly which magnitude of bloodthirsty global tyrant rains bombs on so many sovereign nations for so long, and what kind of “electorate” can’t work out the greater evils, here? Qaddafi evil/ Drones Good?
To quote Prof. Michel Chossudovsky quoting Rep. Denis Kucinich (http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24351):
The Process goes: Step 1: Hegemony wants to do something Nasty Step 2: Hegemony constructs The Narrative to convince the Electorate that the thing Hegemony wants to do is Righteous Step 3: The Fancy Explainers (pundits on both sides of the Pseudo-Dichotomy) confirm/amplify/disseminate the Narrative Step 4: Desired Result
Whereas the Left-Leaning Intelligentsia was once a Sincere If Flimsy Obstruction to such monkeyshines, it is now “with the program”. Lefties who scratch their heads and affect to wonder how it is that The Conversation now only ranges from Center Right to Far Right (despite the rubber bone of rhetorical flourishes like “Socialism” and “Anarchy” that some are allowed to chew on) are flattering themselves.
Read Zizek (aka Hegemony Cricket) cursorily address the topic of Libya (he was obviously happier reviewing “Avatar” and “The Dark Knight”) and what do you notice…?
The striking thing about these comments is Zizek’s ability to make it sound as though humans are not really being blown to bits at all. The interviewer introduces a little unvarnished language (“people die”) and Zizek rises to the challenge like the pro he is. In Zizek’s rhetorical treatment of the concepts of them, Sarkozy, Cameron and Obama get to keep their beautiful suits on.
“How will this spirit of the revolution be institutionalized?”
Exactly how you were, Ziz.
2.
And if I read one more Normative Liberal, On-the-Payroll, thoroughly Brainwashed “intellectual” use the debate-foreclosing buzzword “conspiracy theorist”, I’m gonna puke. The neocon pundit responsible for injecting *that* viral IQ-reducer into the mix deserves a bonus. The “Leftist” American Intelligentsia is the Vichy of our era and its “leaders” appear to be clamoring for the coveted Marshal Petain grant.
3.
I just read someone in a comment thread here on FB refer to Cynthia McKinney as a “whackjob conspiracy theorist” (if this isn’t reactionary rhetoric, what is?); is the following the language of a “whackjob?”:
Now, what do YOU think is more dangerous to Yankee Hegemony… making statements like the above-cited, or, uh, advocating “Socialism”? I don’t agree with everything Cynthia McKinney has to say, but what kind of Collaborator would refer to her as a “whackjob”?
Listen, I understand that academics are paid to NOT rock the boat… but you aren’t paid to go out of your way to slander genuine dissidents (not yet, at least), either… so why not try to curb the impulse? Despite the conditioning.
That Wendy Cope poem is atrocious. There’s another terrible one in the G today. I’ve read and reread them, imagining that there’s a key to them which I’m missing, but if there is I can’t find it. Strange, because she’s an excellent parodist and pasticheur. Perhaps you’re supposed to giggle at how pathetically poor they are. I can’t think of another explanation.
Oh fuck, MM, if you feel strongly about Dame Cope’s sub-Rod-McKuen cack, you’re going to LOVE this…
That is truly… remarkable.
And then he had the pig iron balls to leave the following in a comment thread appended to his blogicle about “experimental” literature:
Leather-eared, no-talent day-glo cunt.
I’m a bit puzzled myself…
The video-irritant with the Elton John eye-wear is there to remind us that it’s so much easier to write about writing than it is to write, MM (not that we’re the ones who need reminding)!
ERASEBOOK
Not much time for long posts these days; managing (and composing for) my wife’s band is deeply rewarding but far more labor-intensive than I would have guessed when we decided to start the project. Co-raising Offsprung is still Priority One, Beloved’s Band is now Priority Two… Writing (aside from commenting abroad, which isn’t nearly as time-consuming as presenting a decent post at TET) is now my neglected deranged secret mistress, locked in the Victorian Attic, smelling of pee and gratuitous talcum powder.
Having said all that, a few thoughts:
1. Facebook. The number of friends in my account has been a running joke with Comrade DJ Sensei Barry for a couple of years now. I only started the damn thing in the first place to re-”connect” with various people I haven’t seen or heard in 20+ years; it started when I Googled the name of the girl I lived in London with in 1990 (in that baronial flat over-looking the Baron’s Court tube station. Ah, cold samosas for lunch… Ben Elton on the telly at suppertime… that satanic night I was in bed with my Maltese mistress in one room while she was in bed with her lingerie-model-mistress in the room next door…)
I pseudonymized my name in order to open a fooking Facebook account without being friended by people I didn’t want to be friended by. I added some old college buddies and even a guy I went to High School with who, it turned out (rather bizarrely, in my opinion), had been living in Berlin, not an hour’s walk from me, for ten years.
What I soon learned is that A) anyone can be a Bohemian Artiste with a quirky, attractive, anti-Hegemonic view of the World when they’re 20… but rare are those who don’t pupate and eclode into the gray moths of Typical Fucking Citizens by the time they’re 35, and B) I fucked a lot of really pretty girls who weren’t all that brilliant or Left-leaning when I was 20, plus C) nostalgia makes terrible bedfellows.
It wasn’t long before I began dreading every day’s opening of the goddamn Facebook: always some corny or crypto-rightwing or simperingly normative-liberal horror just waiting to be eyeballed. This was especially true before I was finally rid of a patriotic, smirky, aspirationally-Winston-Churchill-quoting Nashville redneck I first met in a recording studio back in 1986. His posts were bad enough but the posts of his friends inspired me, more than once, to violate Facebook decorum and rhetorically re-route their nigger-hating lower-intestinal-tracts. I somehow felt too guilty to de-friend Joe (his real and unimprovably-evocative name) because friending him (what was I thinking?) had been my idea. It had something to do with 1986 and the time we drove to that mall in his red convertible the day he’d scored a major record deal, I suppose. But Facebook is violating a natural law by re-”connecting” people who have already been wisely sorted and segregated by the Centrifugal Separators of Time and Hardwired Affinity. I was able to goad Joe into de-friending me, after much effort, by ragging quite deliberately and with deft aplomb, one morning, on Palinoid Teabuggers. Joe’s parting shot had to do with the evils of generalizing, a comment his nigger-hating friends probably “liked”.
The immense relief of having Joe gone taught me to de-friend with the untroubled conscience of a Sun King. A pretty quasi-Bohemian girl I knew just slightly before 9/11 posted some hideous video in which Uriah-Heapish men apologize to All Womyn for All (Cave)Men… she posted the video with the comment, “This made me cry”… so: click. Goodbye forever, you nitwitty cunt.
Great beauties from the near-to-distant past who’d looked me up, friended me and proceeded to have nothing to say after discovering that I’m happily-married: click, click and click.
That stupid fucking anchorwoman (now running for office) who made a nausea-inducing show of “compassion”, for the victims of the Haiti quake, in a series of kudos-craving posts (duplicating her on-camera schtick): click.
Last year I circulated a link to a short film I thought clever/insightful/radical. A few months ago, I posted the short film on my Facebook with an admiring comment… and the film’s director friended me. I was pleased. Until I started reading his fucking schmoozy-ambitious posts (recent film school grad) and had a look at the atrocious list of c. 20-30 atrociously mainstream films he “liked” every day. Christ, I really must have projected (npi) most of his short film’s higher-consciousness-imputing attributes. Click, obviously.
Yesterday I posted the following Facebook comment (subject-matter obvious) in a (real) friend’s thread:
Quite a few people “liked” this comment (including the writer Luc Sante). One of the people who liked it then tried to friend me. I was torn: I didn’t want to offend the friend of an actual friend so, reluctantly, I confirmed her request.
This morning I open the Facebook to see this woman “liking” “Michelle Obama”. What? Had she even taken the trouble to read the ranty comment I’d posted before she’d “liked” it and felt a need to friend me as a result?
Fucking click.
2. “Nothing threatens peace, justice or Life, itself, on Earth as egregiously as the gullibility of the American public.”
Who said that?
3. I always assumed that writing the least-commercial-high-quality-lit on Earth was adequate protection against being plagiarized. Yesterday, while Googling a character of mine (“Napoleon Fanon”, star of six or seven stories; Googling him for reasons too Byzantine to go into here), I discovered that this isn’t the case! My first reaction was to chuckle. But the bit that irritates and confounds me is that the woman posted all 35 pages of the story in italics. The blog (defunct for nearly a year) is kinda fluffy. I mean: my material ain’t exactly of the fluffy variety, kids. Did she read the whole story before kidnapping it? Does anyone not fucking scan and skim anymore…? Where have all the close-readers gone?
‘taught me to de-friend with the untroubled conscience of a Sun King’
Pure gold.
I’ve never had a Fbook account, not just because I haven’t got any friends, but because encounters with the past are usually disappointing. Five minutes of lively chat, then two hours of uncomfortable silence.
I was going to recommend your blog on that Guardian tips thread, but I thought you might eviscerate me.
a) I’ve already de-friended or offended (there’s a limerick in there) over half of the original mice in my misbegotten social experiment, MM… you’re much wiser than I was when I signed up. Not to mention all the naughty anti-American rants I’ve posted, thereon, which I might as well have Fed-Exed directly to the [fill in the blank with official acronym of your choice] with a beard and a turban tossed in for luck.
I also recall a friend who was an avid philanderer: three girlfriends and one FB account in his own name! Classic “wanting to be caught” syndrome.
b) Not only would I be disinclined to eviscerate you but I’m sure your hide is too tough, your feet too nimble, for the thrift-shop tool I keep for that… but such a stunt (recommending anything me-related on a GU tip thread!) would have either been asking for instant pariah-hood (pariahship? pariahtosis?) … or only as dire as their memories are long, probably. Ie: ATF would’ve flamed you.
HALLEFUCKINGLUJAH
I’m not Gay, Comrades (because we men are rather repulsive, aren’t we?), but I would give the writer of this beautiful piece an oven-mitt handjob for services rendered to Humanity (he even got the damned thing in the normally-recalcitrantly-Normative Liberal CounterPunch, which tends to pooh-pooh anything too edgy)…
Amok Time: Fucking the New*
The dirty little secret of the Pop-Porn-Fashion-Fantasy-Role-Playing Industry is that the best sex you will ever have is with your wife (I write this from the perspective of being a husband: translate gender and/or legal arrangement according to your POV).
Whereas the all-but-explicit goal of Advertizing (Capitalism’s Nanny/Lover/Ninja/Chef) is to make you want what you don’t have precisely because you don’t have it (the not-having is the spur and the hook… the endlessly-renewable mercantile resource of grievous consumer need), the Happy Human is the human who is quite fucking pleased with what she/he already has (after a general period of fundamental acquisition) and who works to deepen the connection with it all. Of course, there’s trove-tweaking: you don’t stick to an arbitrary rule of “500 books in my library”… but neither do you look at your library, one day, with tragic ennui, and decide to replace the whole damned thing with something “fresher”. Which is the kind of Sanity that the Neomania they’ve patiently built into the network of our Exploitable Neuroses is doing its best to disable. Eg: The Kindle.
When someone you’ve known (and shared wet towels and chipped coffee cups with), for years, puts his face between your legs and slurps and grunts like he’s competing in the most delicious pie-eating contest in Heaven, the explosive orgasm you will experience, as a result, is only partially down to the rhythmical application of spit-and-friction. It’s more about the fact that someone in a position to know what he’s “talking about” has paid you the kind of compliment that predates civilization and transcends the anonymous reproduction-imperative that spins our planetary (grease-flinging) meat-wheel. No handsome stranger on a bus is capable of paying you the same deeply-informed, ultimately-personalized compliment. No anonymous Penelope Cruz-lookalike (or porn star), likewise, will kiss your toy python with anything as meaningful as the lips that have smiled at you over breakfast for five years. So what’s with all the scentless, naked Javier Bardem / Dolly Parton / Adam Lambert / Jodie Foster fantasies? Simple: Capitalism.
Capitalism sneaked them in there, employing its mercurial ninja-nanny, Advertizing. Capitalism doesn’t want you to be happy with what you already have. Capitalism wants your eye to wander; Capitalism wants you to be bored with everything you buy the instant you “un-box” it. There’s an insidious connection between “needing” the next i-phone and yearning for sex with a celebrity stranger. The next i-phone and the celebrity stranger are both fucking useless and for exactly the same reason: they are only there to undermine your healthy contentment. And, in a psycho-social feedback-loop worthy of M.C. Escher, the subliminal motivation for acquiring the next i-phone is to attract the celebrity stranger (who is, after all, celebrated for her/his strangeness).
As Spock himself once put it (to Stonn):
A pithier critique of Capitalism will never be uttered.
It is not logical. Neither is it natural. You’ve been injected with it, irradiated with it, force-fed it since (the) birth (of the age of Advertizing). But, no: Possession is 9/10 of the Joy. Longing only works as a transition. Be Here Now for Better Orgasms. When I whack off, I can’t help picturing my Wife (in those boots of hers)… which makes me a micro-Threat to the System.
None of this has anything to do with hellish marriages and/or broken i-phones, obviously. If the i-phone is totally busted, do replace it. If you wake up on a depressed sofa, one morning, to the epiphany that you’ve fucked up and married the fast-acting antidote to happiness: do change. But if you find yourself lusting after the next model despite the fact that the one in your possession is perfectly useful (and so familiar to you that you’re actually finally getting the most out of its functionality): you, my dear, are a Suckah.
The Revolution begins between your long-term partner’s legs and it radiates from there.
*[All references to "Capitalism" in this essay are understood to mean "Late-Model Capitalism", as I'm not old enough to recall earlier versions]
The espresso machine now gathering dust in the most inaccessible corner of my kitchen is a monument to your words. I think I’ve almost purged myself of the urge to acquire, then I find a shiny new something in my hand. It’s a disease. My mother claimed that my father couldn’t leave the house without buying something, which I took to be hyperbole until I made a point of observing him. It was literally true – even if it was just a bar of chocolate he would come back with a trophy.
“Inaccessible” because of the Wok, the 5-speed-juicer and the breadmaker [ed.'s note: you'd laugh if you nosed around our cellar], MM? Larf. Actually, I’ve nothing to say on the hoarding chromosome… I’m sure it’s responsible for us all being here (and not being fish, instead, or something). But what if you felt compelled to buy ever-newer replacement models for that espresso machine or the breadmaker and ended up with 5 of each and no end in sight? We’d see the absurdity. But, then… that wasn’t really my inspiration for the post, either. Something to do with fucking my wife and really liking it and wondering why that seems to be a non-standard position to take (npi)….
Germany’s flagship well-off pseudo-intellectual, Karl Lagerfeld, thinks this film is “Fellini-esque”. LOL, as the kiddies say. Still, it’s trashy fun (with great “sucking, spitty, swollen-lipped young sappho” sfx at 5:20) :
HERE
PS DO VISIT MY FAVORITE PORNILLECTUAL TUMBLR, FROM WHICH I STEAL MOST OF THE PHOTOS I DIDN’T TAKE
LYINTOLOGY as your OFFICIAL STATE RELIGION: HOW’S IT DOING SO FAR?
Recently, I posted these two remarks on my Facebook wall:
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I was also heard to say, to Comrade DJ Sensei Barry, during a long walk on a drizzly day:
What did I mean by that? Forget that question for a moment and check out the Big News:
After over a decade of being hooked to a dialysis machine, freakishly-tall arch-fiend OBL was finally cornered in a compound in Pakistan, a few hundred meters from Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point (he probably hunched down, when pushing the dialysis machine into the compound the night he moved in, to remain inconspicuous). The Navy Seals (representing the most technologically-advanced military machine in the Solar System) were not only unable to capture OBL alive (using any of the creepy-cool riot-busting tech they use on G20 protestors… the sonic canons, microwave guns, the net-shooters, the knockout gas, et al)… they were too afraid to hold on to the body, in case anyone should need proof it was OBL they killed, for more than a few hours.
So afraid of the wrath of evil Muslim supermen were the Navy Seals that they dumped that hot-potato corpse in the sea post fucking haste. I think they were probably scared shitless when they dumped him.
Like, “Fuck, did anyone see us? Let’s get the fuck out of here…!”
Also, dumping the most-wanted-corpse-on-Earth into the sea had something to do with respecting OBL’s religious beliefs.
Plus: they didn’t want evil Muslim supermen and fanatics to make pilgrimages to any official dirt-graves and they didn’t have time to come up with the useful idea of keeping the location of the body a secret for as long as they might need to. Or just, of course, storing the body in a freezer in the cellar of one of the many mind-bogglingly-heavily-fortified mega-bases they’re building in Afghanistan. They were under pressure because it was a last-minute thing involving no planning.
Also: no pictures or videos of the dead OBL, or the slightly-before-dead OBL, either. The absence of dead OBL snaps (with the exception of some “leaked” Photoshop jobs that were surely not leaked to supply a subliminal public impression of seeing OBL with heroic Seal bullets in his head) is explained thusly: we really don’t want to gross anybody out. The absence of live, pre-headshot snaps or video of OBL is down to this: the feed went dead at a ridiculously inopportune moment. And Navy Seals don’t have several digital cameras or any hi-tech stuff that could’ve done that job. Sorry! Perfectly reasonable.
The current President’s popularity ratings were abysmal before OBL was capped-and-dunked but they jumped to a healthy 60% (or something) after. Happy coincidental timing for the President!
Well.
Then the head of the IMF, on a personal visit to New York (meaning his Diplomatic Immunity was switched off just then: oh fuck), decided to rape a chambermaid during the early stages of his run for the highest office in France. Polls predicted the rapist trouncing Sarkozy and it just never occurred to the rapist that the maid he raped would report this rape to the police, ending his political ambitions and his job at the IMF in one fell swoop, forever. I want to say “That must be a pretty fucking hot maid” but rape, as we know, is not about sexual attraction: all men are always just one pheromone-whiff away from doing it. Especially swingers. Liking a bunch of sex = liking to rape = Socialist Jew Frog.
What was he thinking? Even worse, the heart-breakingly-African-single-mother-maid he raped (known, immediately, and presumption-of-innocence-skippingly, as the “victim“) is reported, by some sources, to be HIV-positive!
If only she’d had the presence of mind to shout “I have AIDS! Don’t sodomize me!” as the head of the IMF, raping on hostile territory (the President of America is, after all, Sarkozy’s chum and ally), dragged her around his suite, inflicting both anal and oral sodomy and trying to get her panties off (before the anal, presumably, unless he was using her panties as a makeshift cotton condom). Pretty slightly astonishing for a 60-year-old! Perhaps he took Viagra 30 minutes before the hapless, heart-breakingly-African-single-mother-maid blundered into his room, in a fit of evil prescience he must surely now regret.
What an insane old man! Threw it all away over a 32-year-old-single-mom-maid-with-AIDS when he was rich enough to indulge in any number of perversions that wouldn’t have jeopardized his professional and political lives! Didn’t he realize his goose was cooked the instant one of his Rightwing French enemies (who is somehow associated with the owner of the hotel the old rapist was staying in) tweeted about the rape… even before the first police report was filed? Didn’t he realize that Americans, being kind of easy-to-impress and slow-to-do-reading-based-research, would instantaneously believe any lurid allegations of rape against him, and that Patronizing White Liberal Persons with College Degrees only need to hear the phrase “heart-breakingly-African-single-mother-maid” to blossom with tear-filled orgasms of bien pensant empathy and side with the Convenient Government Narrative against him? These people are so smart and nice!
Didn’t he realize how many enemies he’d made as a semi-controversial head of the IMF? Didn’t he realize that the Americans (especially power-players in the Banking Sector) would have preferred an American (or a citizen of one of America’s defacto colonies) in that position, instead? Well, as luck would have it, that’s probably exactly what’s going to happen, now.
To anyone claiming this was a “set-up”… what could this heart-breakingly-African-single-mother-maid possibly gain from lying about this horny old rich French rapist raping her? A hundred thousand bucks? A green card? Ridiculous!
Stupid old nutty old horny rapist Libertine Socialist Jew! Nearly as silly as that evil old Arab at the bottom of the sea!
Have I mentioned already they found porno videos (which will probably turn out to be in some part Queer and pedophiliac) in the dead submerged Arab’s electricity-free command bunker? And evil diaries?
How stupid can the Enemies of Freedom get?
WHEN LEFTIES GO FASCO or HIGHER BRAIN FUNCTIONS SHUT DOWN IN EDUCATED WHITE LIBERALS under CERTAIN PC CONDITIONS
One of the first things a defendant (or the Denounced) might notice, in a Fascist/Totalitarian setting, would be where the burden of proof shifts: upon her/him. This no-nonsense expedient is in deference to the Operators of the Fascist/Totalitarian setting because it removes an impediment to the instant gratification of tossing an Enemy of the Stat(us Quo) into a hole just as soon as said enemy can be snatched from his/her bed one morning (or in the middle of the night). One of the anti-Totalitarian safeguards in a “Free Society” is the presumption of innocence (and its corollary, Due Process): if someone (or The State) accuses you of a serious crime, the burden of proof is not only the accuser, but rises in proportion to the seriousness of the accusation. You’d think anti-Fascists would embrace and defend this standard. One would expect passionate defenses of this standard, most of all, from Left-leaning or Liberalish academics. But: sacre bleu! Not so… not so!
Watch a Fascist crystal form, before your very eyes, in a Facebook comment-thread hosted by (of all things) a Socialist journalist (to be referred to, hereafter, as CONFLICTED SOCIALIST HOST…!
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CONFLICTED SOCIALIST HOST__
It is impossible to despise BHL enough, or to mock him sufficiently. I’ve tried. (God knows I’ve tried.) It just can’t be done.
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Jim____
Recently, BHL wrote a preface for a collection of letters that BHL’s old teacher Louis Althusser had written to his wife Helene, whom of course was strangled by Althusser in 1980. Then again, BHL has been a vigorous defender of movie director Roman Polanski, and now, Strauss-Kahn. Don’t you see a pattern here?
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CONFLICTED SOCIALIST HOST__
Hmmm…. You might be on to something. And let’s remember that BHL named his daughter Justine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justine_%28Sade%29
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Steven Seven Augustine
Something to be said for the presumption of innocence, though. And only a naif would find it impossible to notice the timing of this event (and DSK’s unmentioned run-in with, say, Geithner-and-crew re: Ireland’s debt crisis).
With friends like BHL, of course, who needs enemies? Dragging DSK’s case to the (subliminal) level of a man who has admitted to drugging-and-sodomizing a 13-year-old girl is not helpful.
But there’s something patronizing about treating any woman’s cry of “rape” as true-by-default and something pretty awful about treating all men as just a pheromone-whiff away from the crime. Not to mention the absurdity of suggesting (in the manner of so many Fundamentalist/ Puritan “editorials”) any kind of equivalence between “womanizing” and such violence.
Moments after Rightwingers tweeted the “scandal”, DSK was already a filthy beast and his accuser was already a heartbreaking “victim”. Part of this “travesty of justice” is politics… which is almost more forgivable than the part of it driven by mere laziness.
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CONFLICTED SOCIALIST HOST__
I don’t have an opinion on DSK, as such — but the way BHL argues for his is almost self-parodic. Except that he’s already well beyond that.
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Damon ___
I think Garrison Keillor nailed it in this NYTBR review from a few years ago: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/books/review/29keillor.html
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Steven Seven Augustine
“Except that he’s already well beyond that.”
He needs a Zodiac medallion on that chest hair, though. IMO.
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Sam___
I’m starting to see some left-sectarian defenses of him, too. Apparently those of us who see a problem with forced oral sex are just infected with bourgeois puritanism. I’m convinced that the WSWS will jump to the defense of the next John Wayne Gacy.
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CONFLICTED SOCIALIST HOST__
By the way, Thorstad has a letter in the new issue of Workers Vanguard. Two shudders for the price of one…
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Steven Seven Augustine
“Apparently those of us who see a problem with forced oral sex…”
Isn’t that supposed to be qualified by the word “alleged”? Has the “judicial” system changed that much since I left (fled) the country…?
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Sam____
Facebook is not the judicial system or a media outlet, so I don’t feel that I’m compelled to qualify what I think about the case in such a manner. Certainly that’s not the standard typically applied.
And I have good reason for thinking that, since not just this woman, but *several* women this pig’s been in a position of authority over have made similar allegations.
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Malcolm ____
A single rape (which it sure as hell sounds like he committed) may not even be first on the list of crimes for which the head of the IMF should have to answer.
And BHL is just begging for some humiliating pie/face related reprisal.
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Steven Seven Augustine
Anyone remember how “obvious” it was that those “ruling class” lacrosse players had raped that non-white stripper of the proletariat? Correct Class Politics aren’t a shortcut to the Truth… or clairvoyance. I kinda think that letting the Media run a super-fast kangaroo court-of-opinion smacks (or should) of Rightwing character assassination.
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Steven Seven Augustine
I mean, yipes: I *expect* the Unlettered Masses to be susceptible to tabloid-fueled conclusion-jumping… but I’m astonished that people who should know better are so open to suggestion. Maybe if “journalists” held themselves to some standards (as in: *not* using the word “victim” until, possibly, *after* a trial)…?
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Mary___
Steven, innocent till proven guilty, of course-but the crime as described has so many colonial overtones, I wouldn’t be surprised. I used to clean hotel rooms, too. People who stay in hotels of any kind tend to have very entitled, colonialist attitudes towards the maids, believe you me. The worst part of the job is the ever-present possibility of running into creepy freaky visitors on power trips. The power dynamic that the head of the IMF staying at an ultraswank hotel probably imposes on a room cleaner especially an immigrant woman from Guinea -that could so easily turn into literal rape. We already know he finds Rikers Island too declasse for his fine self-no one to “service” him there in his cell.
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Steven Seven Augustine
Mary: you’ve added your context to help sharpen your own conclusion but what of the other context… of DSK as the head of a very troublesome (for the Geithner clan) IMF? DSK was, in some respects, a serious enemy of the Dollar-as-Global-Currency… this context, and his upcoming trip to Berlin, are important, too. And seriously under-reported. People are weighing in on this with only cursory exposure to the facts of a bigger picture.
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Mary___
Doesn’t mean the man is not a rapist.
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Steven Seven Augustine
”Doesn’t mean the man is not a rapist.”
What I’d expect to rely on, in judging whether or not he is, is something a little more substantive, rational and actually fair than lurid tabloid insinuations and our secret PC prejudices. I’m especially shocked by the Puritanical edge to so much commentary equating the man’s (to Americans) “libertine” past to Rape. “Adultery” is not Rape. But most of the commentary I’ve read is issuing from a country in which a track-and-field coach was *fired* for letting a boy run topless.
Wait: is Paddy Chayefsky writing this thread? Any minute, Lee J. Cobb is going to come out and deliver an inspiring monologue about the beauty of justice, the dangers of herd-think and demagoguery and the lessons of l’affaire Dreyfus… ooops. That last one would be too fancy.
All kidding aside: depressing.
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Mary___
Steven, these are not “secret PC prejudices” nor “puritanism” nor a penchant for “lurid tabloid insinuations” on my part.You are right that being a “libertine” is not necessarily the same as being a rapist-but sometimes the behavior of a rapist is minimized and denied with talk of “libertinism.” I simply find the word of the alleged victim more credible, so far, than that of the alleged perpetrator. There’s no evident conspiracy that she was paid off by discreditors of Strauss-Kahn’s economic policies- so she has nothing to gain, really by coming forward. Even if she has papers, immigration status is always a precarious thing. Maids in many places are pressured not to voice complaints about customer behavior towards them-so she might have been risking her job, and the economic welfare of everyone who depends on her job. One in three women on this planet has suffered gender-based violence. Women of color, immigrants, and working class/poor/women in “service” jobs are among those especially at risk. If my first instinct is empathy for the evident victim here, I don’t think it’s anything to apologize for. about an hour ago • Like • 2 people
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Notice how nobody in the thread wanted to touch my reference to the notorious “Ivy League Lacrosse Rapists” case… in which… too late, too late… the accusation of the non-white stripper was revealed to be false. And it seemed so obvious, too. Even I was disappointed that the fuckers hadn’t done it.
I’m no defender of DSK; I’m not his fan and no fan of the IMF (with or without DSK heading it). But I am terrified at A) how effortlessly-manipulated public opinion is and B) how quickly we become Junior Fascists in the name of a Good Cause.
I was intrigued about how the US tried to claim moral high ground as regards the assassination of Bin Laden.
Sneaking into another country and exacting capital punishment without trial seems only a hair’s breadth away from 9/11.
Bin Laden was a dangerous individual ( a UK educated, US supported dangerous individual at that ) but surely putting him on trial rather than re-enacting a Black Ops video game would have been the only way of attaining the moral high ground.
As regards DSK – I’m unconvinced that a maid would walk into a room and within minutes want to have sex with a semi-gnarled bloke like him BUT he is innocent until proven otherwise and given the speculation-gone-out-of-control in the media I can’t see how a fair trial is even possible.
Comrade ET! Good to see you back!
Re: DSK as sex-magnet: obviously not. But between that obvious “no” and the possible “yes” of the rape charge, there’s a plausible third answer. I’m no defender of Julian Assange (who is, in my opinion, either a witting-or-unwitting agent of disinformation), but the timing (and circumstances) of *his* rape charges were just as fishy. DSK may be some mutant form of evil Capitalist Socialist, but nothing I’ve read about him before now has indicated that the man was fucking insane. And he’d have to be, given his immediate political ambitions, to have done what he is accused of doing, where and when he is accused of doing it.
Context is always important when drawing conclusions (whether or not the final truth is even knowable). Enormous amounts of power are always in the balance as covert battles rage above our Serfy little heads, IMO, and “dirty tricks” are part of the arsenal. We’re encouraged to be naive; we’re encouraged to see The World through a sort of quaintly antique Billy Wilder filter in which the lowest lows are embodied by nasty old Mr. Potter in “It’s A Wonderful Life”. I can’t see the world that way, any more.
If the maid had come forward (herself and not as an abstraction with no face, no name, no direct statement in her own words, verbatim) with a tale that was all-but-buried by mainstream press, it wouldn’t strike me as so absurd; I’d be inclined to consider as more likely. Knowing how the world usually works, there are far too many red flags and herrings in the case as it has been presented, thus far. One thing I find amazing/ridiculous are the headlines accorded the maid’s lawyer every time he makes the statement “IT WAS NOT CONSENSUAL” or “IT WAS NOT ENTRAPMENT”. As if her lawyers would inform us if it were. As if being a headline makes it true. Where are DSK’s supporting counter-headlines? I smell smear.
The burden of proof is on her… she (aka her team) has to make a plausible case that it wasn’t consensual, that this isn’t entrapment.
No one can suddenly accuse you, Comrade ET, of stealing their car or bashing their face in, and have you tossed, within hours, into prison over it, without some pretty compelling evidence: words alone (or even your fingerprints on their car or face) won’t stitch you up. But there’s PC Hysteria around Rape, I’m afraid, and the burden of proof (unconstitutionally, in the US) is suddenly on the (invariably male) Defendant. I don’t think it serves Feminism (or Justice, in general) to cordon Rape off as a constitutional-rights-neutralizer; we need to fix that (which would mean Society would have to mature, psycho-sexually, to the extent that female Rape victims are no longer stigmatized and treated, a la mountain-villages-in-Iran, like damaged goods) . Rape should/must be treated like any other violent crime and the presumption of innocence must hold.
Now, bearing the context of this particular case in mind, if DSK’s powerful enemies had, indeed, wanted to stitch him up in the most cost-effective way possible, having an African maid accuse him of Rape could not be bested. Hard to discuss that in mixed company without flirting with pariah-hood, but it’s true (which illustrates neatly how taboos of any nature almost invariably protect and advance Rightist programs: if you can’t even discuss something, you are living in some degree of Fascist Paradise).
I think this is an interesting essay (excerpted) on the DSK matter:
“I have written about the anomalies of the case. One of the most striking is the confirmed reports in the French and British press that a political activist for French President Sarkozy, Jonathan Pinet, tweeted the news of Strauss-Kahn’s arrest to Arnaud Dassier, a spin doctor for Sarkozy, before the news was announced by the New York police.
“Pinet’s explanation for how he was the first to know is that a “friend” in the Sofitel Hotel, where the alleged crime took place, told him. Is it merely a coincidence that the men assigned the task of removing the Strauss-Kahn threat to French President Sarkozy’s re-election had a clued-in friend in the Sofitel Hotel? Did the police clue-in the “friend” before they made the public announcement? If so, why?
“What bothers me about the Strauss-Kahn affair is that if the police have evidence that supports their insistence on his guilt, it is pointless for the police to set Strauss-Kahn up in the media. Generally, set-ups like this occur only when there is no evidence or when the evidence has to be fabricated and cannot withstand examination.
“As a person who had a Washington career, I find other aspects of the case disturbing. Strauss-Kahn had emerged as a threat to the establishment. Polls showed that as the socialist candidate, he was the odds-on favorite to defeat the American candidate, Sarkozy, in the upcoming French presidential election. Perhaps it was only electoral posturing to help defeat Sarkozy, but Strauss-Kahn indicated that he intended to move the International Monetary Fund away from its past policy of making the poor pay for the mistakes of the rich. He spoke of strengthening collective bargaining, and of restructuring mortgages, tax and spending policies in order that the economy would serve ordinary people in addition to the banksters. Strauss-Kahn said that regulation needed to be restored to financial markets and implied that a more even distribution of income was required.
“These remarks, together with a likely win over Sarkozy in the French election, made Strauss-Kahn a double-barreled challenge to the establishment. The third strike against him was the recent IMF report that said China would surpass the US as the world’s first economy within five years. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/imf-bombshell-age-of-america-about-to-end-2011-04-25
“People who haven’t spent their professional life in Washington may not understand the threat to Washington that is in the IMF report. Whether deserved or not, the IMF has a lot of credibility. By placing China as the number one economic power by the end of the next US presidential term, the IMF thrust a dagger through the heart of American hegemony. Washington’s power is based on America’s economic supremacy. The IMF report said that this supremacy was at its end.
“This kind of announcement tells the political world that, as the headline read, “the age of America is over.” For the first time in decades, other countries can see the prospect of escaping from US domination. They don’t have to be puppet states, part of the hegemonic empire. They see the prospect of serving their own people and their own interests instead of those of Washington. European countries, for example, forced to fight for Washington in Afghanistan and Libya, see light at the end of the tunnel. They can now think about refusing.
“Although rich and a member of the establishment, and independently of his behavior toward women, Strauss-Kahn made the mistake of revealing that he might have a social conscience. Either this social conscience or the hubris of power led him to challenge American supremacy. This is an unforgivable crime for which he is being punished.
“My friend, Alexander Cockburn, an intelligent and civilized person who is derided by right-wingers as a communist, lacks my experience of Washington. Consequently, he thinks that the facts will come out, although he seems to prefer that they come out on the side of the maid and not Strauss-Kahn.
“If Alex were the Bolshevik he is said to be, he would know that no high-ranking figure who was serving the establishment would be destroyed on the basis of the word of an immigrant maid living in a sub-let apartment in a building for aids victims. The very notion that the US establishment craves justice to this extent is a total absurdity. Americans are so indifferent to injustice that the American public shrugs off the hundreds of thousands and millions of women, children, and village elders who are murdered, maimed, dispossessed, and displaced by the US military in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and wherever Washington and the military/security complex, while feeding on power and profit, can claim to be protecting Americans from “terrorists” or bringing democracy to the heathen.
“The American criminal justice system is riddled with wrongful convictions and stinks of injustice. The US has a much higher rate of incarceration than alleged authoritarian regimes, such as China, and routinely destroys the lives of young people, and even mothers of small children, for using drugs.
“Strauss-Kahn’s indictment serves emotional needs of conservatives, left-wingers, and feminists as well as establishment agendas. Conservatives don’t like the French, because they did not support the US invasion of Iraq. The left-wing doesn’t like rich white guys and IMF officials, and feminists don’t like womanizers. But even if the government’s case falls apart in the courtroom, Strauss-Kahn has been removed from the French presidential race and from the IMF. This, not justice for an immigrant, is what the case is about.
“Many Americans are unable to comprehend that authorities would remove a threat with a frame-up. But far worst has occurred. Francesco Cossiga, a former President of Italy, revealed that many of the bombings in Europe during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, which were blamed on communists, were in fact “false flag” operations carried out by the CIA and Italian intelligence in order to scare voters away from the communist party. Cossiga’s revelations resulted in a parliamentary investigation in which intelligence operative Vincenzo Vinciguerra stated: “You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple: to force the public to turn to the state to ask for greater security.”
If democratic governments will murder innocents for political reasons, why wouldn’t they frame someone? Whether innocent or guilty, Strauss-Kahn has been framed in advance of his trial.”
UPDATE: The popularity of Alleged Rape as Public Opinion Tool
UPDATE 2: If you can’t orchestrate a Rape, Adulterous Sex Will Do: look at this example (supplied by Comrade Barry): remember the Larry Craig “scandal”?
Ignore how innocuous the whole thing seems (or should seem) while bearing in mind that Sen. Craig disappeared from politics, and public discourse, soon after this event. Trawling for a pissoir fuck (or appearing to) merely looks like bad luck/poor judgment on the former Senator’s part until we consider the context:
Again: this is the sort of thing which is constantly going on over our Serfy little heads but, back in 2007, when Craig fell into his trap, most of us only noticed that some politician had been busted for trying to suck cock, or something, and we tut-tut-tutted and moved on. We always move on.
Yesterday’s Insults are Tomorrow’s Compliments: The Unexpurgated Version
1592: The first printed appearance of the phrase “Once upon a time,” in its original German form, Es war einmal, is traceable to a village in the region of the Spreewald, via a press in Strassburg. The printing of the phrase was at the expense of Victor’s ancestor, Konstantin von Lehde, a wealthy brewer who published a dozen copies of his collected Märchen (fairytales), as well as later financing the printing of a pocket Bible ideal for itinerant tradesmen, who, although they may not have been able to read the little book, carried it in their pockets as a protective talisman for their travels. Konstantin von Lehde’s fairytales were burlesqued transcriptions of stories he remembered from his childhood, some for children, others not, and copies of the book, printed on vellum, were distributed among members of his extended family as reminders of his wealth, learnedness, generosity, and wit.
1830: The von Lehde clan had migrated, largely, to nearby Berlin and then from Berlin to America, “fleeing the Jews,” (as Victor’s father gleefully put it) in the middle of the 19th century, taking their place, among the Germans of Wisconsin, with the anglicized name of Leader.
1930: An original copy of the von Lehde book of fairytales remained in the Leader family until well into the twentieth century, when it vanished from the custodianship of Victor’s great-grandfather, Jacob Emmanuel Gustave Leader, the bushy-mustached patriarch at the time the clan was brought low by the Great Depression. He was rumored to have bartered the rare book for nothing less sensible than a barrel of heating oil. All that remains of the heirloom is a loosely bound copy of the book’s first tale, inscribed on yellowing paper, itself now an heirloom, written exquisitely, most probably in Jacob Emmanuel Gustave Leader’s own fine, waltzing hand; a faintly recognizable corruption of Rumpelstiltskin (or “Rumpenstinzschen”).
Eine frischvermählte junge Frau läuft vom Wasserholen aus der dörflichen Quelle durch den finsteren Wald nach Hause…
A newly married young woman was walking home through the forest after a trip to the village well. She was blonde as straw and white as moonlit snow, with eyes more blue than a teapot. Out of boredom she took an unfamiliar path through the forest and glimpsed, over a high garden wall, a ripe red bunch of cherries. Seeing the ripe cherries, she realized how hungry she was, and, putting down her bucket of water, climbed the garden wall to partake. In the midst of straddling the wall and partaking, she was startled by a hideously black man in a large hat, the master of the garden. The hideously black man, or mannikirk, had her fast by the toe, never to let her to go.
Let me go! Cried the newlywed. But the mannikirk only laughed and cried the word “higher!” and seized her by the ankle instead.
Let me go! Cried the newlywed. But the mannikirk only laughed and cried the word “higher!” and seized her by the calf instead.
Let me go! Cried the newlywed. But the mannikirk only laughed and cried the word “higher!” and seized her by the knee instead.
Finally, the poor newlywed fainted in a rapture of sheer terror. When she came to again, the ugly black creature agreed to grant her freedom, but only if she promised her first-born child in exchange for this clemency. Failing to take such a promise seriously, she made it easily, and the mannikirk freed her. She hurried home with the bucket of water and revealed nothing of the matter to her husband, the handsome woodcutter. The handsome woodcutter was blonde as butter, and white as milk in the morning, with eyes more blue than a Robin’s eggs.
Monate vergehen und die wunderschöne Frischvermählte erwartet ein Kindlein…
Months went by and the beautiful young newlywed became heavy with child. She had forgotten all about the funny black man in the very large hat, when, quite unexpectedly, the very creature appeared at the door of her cottage. With the pomp and confidence of the mayor himself, he presented himself to the young woman’s husband, the handsome woodcutter, staking his claim on the child soon to be born.
Knowing nothing of the black creature’s prior encounter with his young wife, the husband laughed and prepared to fetch the mannikirk a bracing kick to the seat of his britches. The mannikirk, however, asserted his claim, and the wife was forced to confess, in tears, to her husband. The black fellow allowed that the only way out of the bargain was to guess his true name before the birth of the child, which he was quite confident was an impossible thing to do.
Aber der Ehemann ist klug und folgt dem Mannikirk zu einer dunklen Höhle im Wald…
The handsome woodcutter, however, cleverly followed the mannikirk to a cave in the forest, in front of which boiled a pot. Concealed in the bushes, the brave and clever husband kept a close eye on the mannikirk until nightfall, whereupon the peculiar black creature removed its large hat, revealing a pointy bald black head, and danced around the boiling pot, singing a song, confident that no one could see or hear it:
Call me hipche Flederlitz,
Purzinigele, Cavallius,
But if you want to solve my puzzle
Call me little Hopfenhütel!
A fortnight later, close on the birth of the child, the mannikirk appeared before the cottage driving a fine black carriage pulled by fine black horses, wearing a fine black coat and the finest black overlarge cap with a raven’s black feather in it, patiently waiting to collect its prize. The husband came out of the cottage and greeted the black creature as Little Hopfenhütel, its proper name, whereupon the mannikirk flew into an unimagineable rage. It accuses the young couple of cheating to default on a promise, abused them with blasphemous oaths, and rode off in a fury, at which the astonished young wife and husband could do nothing but laugh with relief and dance with joy, singing:
Call him hipche Flederlitz,
Purzinigele, Cavallius,
But if you want to solve his puzzle
Call him little Hopfenhütel!
Es ist allerdings der Mannikirk, der am Ende lacht…
It was the mannikirk who had the last laugh, however, as the fair young mother, whose hair was blond as straw and whose skin was white as moonlit snow and whose eyes were more blue than a teapot, gave birth, the very next day, to a babe as black as a raven, even blacker than the blackest night in the black forest.
Search as they might, high and low, in the village and in the forest, the poor young couple could not find the mannikirk to relieve them of the terrible duty of raising the changeling as their own, leaving the young wife to regret her greed, and the husband to regret his cleverness, forever.
The End.
He’s in the middle of painting the fourth in a series of large canvasses based on Little Hopfenhütel, the crumbling paper copy of which he keeps in a vault, with a copy/translation of the copy pinned to a bulletin board next to the blackboard he keeps in the studio. The series is the first representational work he’s done in thirty years, though it hovers, still, on the verge of abstraction, devoid of trompe l’oeil effects or Renaissance perspective and emphasizing concentrated patches of black. Black, and enamel-red for the cherries, and also red for detailed pudendal diagrams and schematics plus the leitmotif of birth’s gushing blood, flowing (and furling) neatly in Hokusai waves. Black and red over ash-white or bone-gray and textured with cross-hatchings which are scratches and rips in the canvas.
Little Hopfenhütel is either a rich layer cake of obscure psychological allusions and symbols keyed to the medieval Germanic mind or a rather more obvious allegory of infidelity; of marital stealth, lies and race betrayal. He’d decided to paint it both ways.
Today is his Death day.
The journalist has big tits but he doesn’t care. Or only slightly. Honestly, he can’t remember how he feels about big tits. Big white Aryan tits. Does he really not care? What is it about big white tits that he still manages to care about, if care about them he does? He feels (inspired by her big tits perhaps) like making a declaration. A fuck-you-and-everything-else speech. He wants to say:
-Thirty million years of evolution on Earth and your primary concern is getting a job? This is the question The Artist throws in your stupid face. Or the question that Victor Leader throws in your stupid face. A controlled aesthetic fury regarding the fairytale of civilization in its futile response to existence. The art itself is excreted from the lower bowels of my furious mind, basically. I sell the shit and selling it gives me power. I use the power to tell civilization to fuck off. I use the power to sleep late, dress how and if I like, break minor laws with impunity and fuck whom I want, where and how I want, as often as I want to fuck…
The End.
But (and this is true) his mustache prevents him. Noa likes it, the mustache, she likes the colonial allusions it throws off, but if it weren’t for Noa he’d shave it. Wearing a mustache renders making fuck-you speeches perilous. Opens him to ridicule unless he remains within a narrow range of gestures and poses and modes of speech. People tittering, laughing uncontrollably, before you’re halfway through it. It wasn’t always thus. Instead of the fuck-you-and-everything-else speech he says, with his deep, distinctive, lens-grinding, cigarette-sculpted voice:
“The artist’s role in society remains to remain outside of it.”
She sticks the recorder closer to his mouth for emphasis and asks him if he’s come to Northern Europe for the light, and his half-smiled answer (which he’s used twice before, in other interviews; if she was a real journalist or even just a reader of art rags she’d have known that) is “No, I came for the healthcare.”
-The light I paint with is in my mind, etc.
He hates what he hears sometimes when he hears himself being interviewed. The stock faux-mystic replies. His left hand rests palm-down on his thick denim crotch in the manner of a Polish workman in his afterwork beergarden slouch. The fingers do a little fan-dance from time to time for emphasis and she glances but otherwise doesn’t react. He still can’t believe he’s 62. He has a fading blonde crewcut and a fading blonde mustache and the ruddy complexion of a khaki-clad Boer.
Dick Haymes is singing You’ll Never Know.
The Jesus Freak is shuffling up Rosenthaler Strasse.
Item: Tod is snug in his big black British monstrosity, navigating from the villa in Potsdam, listening to a mixtape, a cassette from 1987, a chrome tape at full blast with the Dolby C on, the muffled fidelity of dinosaur Dolby C, just waiting for something, some phrasework or attitude or production gimmick to fire his imagination. Human League; Jene Loves Jezebel; Lene Lovich; Sparks. More than once he resists the urge to veer off the road and drive unharmed through the wall of one of the anal white cottages that nestle behind their hedges in a Teutonic row. The beast is that solid. A militarized Humber Pullman limousine, a lightly-armored staff car intended for North Africa, used by the mayor of Plymouth, mint condition, modern engine, bomb proof, if he floored it and wrenched the steering hard to the right and just detoured through some German’s hideously tasteful living room and out into the garden and down the alley he’d barely feel the jolts.
Q: Mr. Spectre, tell me, if you hate the Germans so much, why keep a home in Germany?
A: I think it was Machiavelli who said that one should always keep one’s enemies near. Ditto one’s collectors.
He’s the biggest Art Star in Deutschland.
Today is his Death day, too.
Midway through the Q&A. The interview is conducted in a corner of the studio where Victor has covered practically everything, except the bar stools on which they sit, with sheets (the canvases, significant objects, rough sketches, the bulletin board and the blackboard with ghostly pentimenti of half-erased notes misting over it…anything that might provide a clue to the new series), and Victor asks her, again, which magazine he is being interviewed for. And she is laughably vague about it, stammering a little; blushing, even.
Do terrorists blush?
The standard German insolence of her generation towards his is the most reassuring aspect of her performance. He is fairly certain, at least, that she isn’t some fair-haired Iranian sleeper agent come to blow him up, or an operative for some bureau keeping track of his anti-American pronouncements, though he can’t rule out her being some kind of cool, postmodern detective sent by his ex-wife Gundi to seduce him into admitting that his income is roughly three times greater than he is swearing to in the divorce proceedings. Her insolence is possibly also a German’s idea of flirting, though he doesn’t rule out the pawn-takes-rook variation that he is being set up for being drugged mid-fuck and kidnapped by cash-strapped, latte-fueled descendants of the RAF.
He has his suspicions. As does everyone in the 21st century.
It is early afternoon and the high white hunger-buzz aerates his thoughts as the burst yolk of the late-summer sun ooze across the soot-frosted panes of the angled skylight. He is so hungry he wants to bite her sugar-frosted cheek, but he isn’t about to invite her to a decent lunch, so he starves through the interview, or “the interview”, hoping at least to be spared his borborygmus, as much as he loves the word, though the studio’s expensive silence works against him, exposing them both to noises like they’ve never heard. Sounds like muffled (Dolby’d) genocide in a distant village down there in his lower intestinal tract but they both pretend not to notice.
To N.K. in appreciation of her terrible penmanship.
On the wall behind the journalist’s head was a handwritten note from Noa (some inspiring quote or other; pithy words from some great DWM) and Victor wanted to ask the journalist to look at it and tell him if in her honest opinion that looked like terrible penmanship to her.
The big-titted Aryan “journalist” asks about his super-famous friend Tod Spectre; how long they’ve known each other; how they met; his opinion of Spectre’s work; hardly the questions of an initiate. Passing the recorder from her lips to his (he’s sure he can smell her saliva on the grille of the microphone) she wants to discuss his interpretation of Canto V, Tod’s three hundred and eighty-pound, fully-functional, scaled-to-humans iron, oak, copper and steel model of a mousetrap. Five dollars of genuine American currency set in a crisp note on the mousetrap’s trigger as bait. If he agrees with certain critics that it’s anti-Semitic.
She asks Victor about his Allah series and if it signaled a return to large-scale canvases, painted in soaky daubs with sponges, and what the dishwater-gray washes, applied in so many layers, represent, if not breath or ectoplasm or even a liquid representation of the drabness of the modern soul.
Victor shrugs. His fingers do the fan-dance: “If I could talk it, I wouldn’t have to paint it.”
Item: Tod is penetrating the outer rings of greater Berlin, ringing up Simon, listening to the Bauhaus cover of Telegram Sam full blast, feeling bawdy and rich and young.
Item: Simon will answer the phone with mock-comedic gruffness. Without the distancing cushion of the mock-comedic gruffness filter, Simon’s life would be a horror.
He alone of the friends will have survived this warm blue late September afternoon.
122,056 people, around the world, will die, of various causes, before midnight, CET.
The End.
Most artists want to talk about The Work, not the private life, but Victor has very little to say about The Work. He prefers to extemporize on current events, philosophical pedantry, gossip, the work of other painters, his early struggles, personal setbacks and boyhood reminiscences. He very much enjoys discussing his father, the former chief deputy with the Sheriff’s Department of Busch County, Wisconsin, the surprisingly-light-on-his-feet bear whose bushy white eyebrows decorated eyes as blue as the eyes of the poet Robert Frost; as blue as the eyes of the interviewer’s herself or as blue as the blue in the eyes of the young newlyweds in Little Hopfenhütel. Though blue is not a part of the palette for his work in this series.
Tod says “blue” is a Disney color and Victor agrees. They never use it. Simon uses it a lot.
Whenever Victor thinks of Konstantin von Lehde, which is often, these days, usually while he works, he sees his father, Charlie, dressed in medieval finery, sloshing a vortex of ale in a big stein with one hand and cradling an exotic-looking pipe in the other and telling racist jokes between puffs and gulps. Only back then they would have been mostly about hornéd Jews, the jokes. But they wouldn’t have been jokes. Did people tell jokes in the Middle Ages?
Is his girlfriend cheating on him with a writer? With a fucking scribbler?
“Listen, the truth is, hiding inside every wildly successful art-huckster with a cynical gallerist and a Swiss bank account is a visionary artist on a quest. All the success in the world doesn’t mollify whatever real world wound or sense of estrangement that drove the artist into the fairytale kingdom of his imagination in the first place. Look at Picasso.”
“Picasso?”
“Don’t sneer. The less people in the so-called art world talk about Picasso, the more relevant he is. He’s more relevant than ever. When was the last time you discussed gravity? Picasso is gravity. He’s also the bridge between the supreme accomplishments of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries and the talentless stuff we’re doing. The gesture-plotting and idea-spinning. This bullshitty, high-IQ advertising.” He laughs. She doesn’t.
“Maybe you shouldn’t quote me on that.”
He wants her to say something that he can sneer at with open derision from behind his mustache. He wants to kick himself for talking so much; for being so voluble; for wearing a mustache. She is on some kind of power trip, this so-called journalist. Canny and laconic. Despite the strange blushing.
To N.K. in appreciation of her terrible penmanship.
He suddenly and vividly recalls happening across a magazine rolled up in a Black-and-Decker giftbox in the back of his father’s tool locker, in the garage, when he was 14 or 15, overwhelmed by the odor from his father’s shoe polish kit. Full-page earthtone photo of a well-oiled undressed pudding-smooth chocolate female with a massive Afro, on all fours, behind whom knelt a hairy, big-bellied redneck in a sheriff’s hat and in front of whom knelt a hairy, big-bellied redneck in a Klansman’s hood. You could hand-feed sugar cubes to deer through the backporch door of our house on Maple Lane. Father was legendary among the law enforcement workers of the state of Wisconsin for shooting a crow through his bathroom window while sitting on the can.
She glances at her watch and says, “You became an artist accidentally…”
“I was kicked out of art school because I could draw too well. Stuff looked too realistic. Heaved a cinder block through the back window of an instructor’s Cadillac. This was long before car alarms, mind you. Anyway, the other thing I did was vandalize a painting in a local exhibition with permanent markers and the gallerist tracked me down because he liked what I’d done better than the original painting. Hired me to vandalize more of the same artist’s stuff. A very 1974 story. Couldn’t happen now. Now you’d go to jail and pay damages.”
“I hope it won’t count as sexual harassment if I comment at this point that your hair is… incredible… ?”
Victor has a mustache.
Victor’s girlfriend is bald.
(A youngish Sinatra is singing.)
Victor’s mother sniffed at Charlie’s corpse in the over-sized casket. As though it was a clever-but-unconvincing fake. She sing-songed, from behind her alcohol-scented veil, “That’s not Charlie,” but that big dead body right there was Charlie Leader; it would still be Charlie Leader when it had rotted away into a busted xylophone of gummy brown bones, for Charlie Leader would be nowhere else to be found, not anywhere else in the totality of the Universe, his precise location anything but a mystery. That was Charlie Leader right there.
(Frank, then Tony, then Vic. All the old dreamsongs.)
His beloved father. As queers-and-coons-hating as anyone could expect a chief deputy of the Sheriff’s Department of Busch County, Wisconsin, in the middle of the 20th century, to be. This was a man who referred to crows as “niggerwigs,” and found a symbolic purpose in shooting them whenever he could, although Victor had loved him, looked up to him, sought his canny guidance through most of the old man’s life. When you edited out his one peculiar (and some would say humanizing) flaw; the virulent racism; he’d been the noblest, wisest man who’d ever walked the earth. One might even have called him a proto-feminist. Victor recalled clearly the old man washing the dishes late at night, coming in after a long day; washing the dishes quietly with his back to everything and his pistols dangling like barbells from his waist and mother calling out from her interrupted snooze on the sofa, illuminated in black and white by a swinging Steve Allen or a gesticulating Jack Parr, you know you don’t have to do that, Charlie.
Charlie would wink down at the boy on the stool beside him and keep right on scrubbing.
His poor father chained by civil law to the doughy white pile of the body his wife was reduced to being and which Victor himself had had a hand in ruining, merely by being born. Vic remembered what a big deal it had been to drive into town and see Goldfinger, in 1962, his father dreaming out loud, as it were, in public, in the deep velour seats of The Odeon, the cars and the pussy and the license to kill. He smiled in the middle of the interview, remembering it. Both wearing dinner jackets and entering the theater with a certain manly decorum. Victor must have been about fifteen. One of the supposed big deals of James Bond had been his “license to kill,” a discretionary freedom of some distinction back in 1962, no doubt, but everyday traffic cops had that now. Every school kid or customs agent with one good eye.
Sometimes he felt it, drifting off to sleep, a kind of rusty radiance glowing over the rim of the western horizon. America and all of her tensions, lighting up the sky. That horny teen homicidal vitality. An ocean that wasn’t nearly wide enough.
The End.
James Bond. Foreign blondes with big tits showing sudden, unbelievable compliance. Victor pretends to misunderstand.
Item: Tod punches redial to remind Simon to bring his copy of the book.
Item: Simon strains in mock-comedic agony on the toilet.
(Tony Bennett.)
(Brook Benton.)
He comes in an iffy fashion. Can the viscous be said to trickle? Definitive proof that white lips just don’t do it for him. Victor says, softly, sadly, in the timbre and cadence of an alcoholic remembering out loud,
“The quiescent dick is a frog. The Prince, smooth, upright, tall and … strong…”
She doesn’t realize. She is slurping too loud to hear him and he pushes her face so gently away. She shifts back on her haunches and backhands her salivaslick chin and says, flinty German accent intact, “Well, what we have here is still a frog, despite of my best efforts,” and sort of flicks at it half-humorously as he helps her to her feet, amazed that a woman can remain so insolent after having held so harmless a dick melted on her tongue for longer than a minute.
Victor points. “Whoa. Is that thing still on?”
(Johnny Mathis and his weakly-yodeled Chances Are.)
“Anything you’d like to say in conclusion?”
“What if I say I won’t let you walk out of here with that?”
“What if I say my karate expert boyfriend is waiting outside in the taxi?”
He watches her repair her lipstick with the semi-grimace of calculation.
“Okay. How much?”
“How much of what?”
“How much for the tape, obviously.”
“The tape? This tape? This tape is not for sale. It’s a masterpiece. Can’t you just see it? ‘A brave new direction’… ? A fresh new…”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“It’s not quite a 1974 kind of story, I admit… ” Packing the recorder away. Zipping her top. “But a story, nevertheless, I think.”
The End.
Victor wants to stab her through the heart, and calculates, quickly, if he’d get away wth it, then wonders, in a fleeting panic, where a knife is. The very sharp old deli knife he keeps for the bread, cheese and the salami he eats for quick lunch while working. The one he takes such retrograde pleasure in sharpening. Picasso would kill her.
“I will send you an invitation to the Vernissage. I can put you on the list. Plus one?”
He’d forgotten how much he hated Performance Art.
(Sammy. Candy Man.)
2
Victor knocks on Noa’s door with his left hand and aims his phone at the door with his right, watching the left hand through the viewfinder. The hand looks smaller, slightly green, and far away. It operates in a different time continuum; a kindler, gentler era; a few milliseconds behind. He enjoys the sensation and knocks again just to watch himself doing it. It suddenly hits him that he’s still wearing his wedding ring.
At Noa’s place on the previous weekend, he’d blown a Rorschach of Berlin soot into a tissue with his trumpeter’s hunch in her WC when what should he espy but a book tossed atop a tower of white towels, a brand new hardbound book, thick as a bible, sitting on the towels where she obviously hadn’t meant to leave it.
Her face is all mouth, little eyes, stub nose; she enters a room with her lips. She is the most beautiful thing he’s ever laid eyes on. He’s always, all over again, knocked out by her looks; even after brief trips to her bathroom (hung with big-name-photographer portraits of her) he comes back grateful, as though he’s been gone for years. Her face remains a shock (the difference between the profoundly beautiful and the profoundly ugly being that you never get used to the former), burns a hole through his memory and falls out and he dives after it, like a boy, breathless, as it burns clear through to the center of his libido. That beautiful. He’d said, casually, hefting the book,
“Mind if I borrow this?”
…but the look he got in response indicated that he’d made some sort of discovery.
“It’s for my mother.”
That look of how should I look. Well, was it a porno? Embarrassingly lowbrow masscult tripe? Noa often accused Victor of testing her… challenging her intellect… which was simply her paranoid self-consciousness about that heavy Nigerian accent of hers coming out. The fetching insecurity. The accent Victor found sexy as hell and wouldn’t have changed even if it was possible to do so with the push of a button. He considered her to be one of the sharpest girls he’d ever (ahem) come across, though deeply learnéd in a book-sense: no. But so what? She was a prodigy of the emotions. That thick black blood of hers. Her preposterously fat mother Nelke.
To N.K. in appreciation of her terrible penmanship.
-What?
More than the dedication, it was the last offering in the collection which gave Victor his hairs-on-the-back-of-his-neck moment. There’s a woman in the story, a black woman, a Nigerian model by the name of Sadie, an atom-by-atom, vowel-by-vowel transcription of Noa. Sadie Olubodun was different from Noa Kiko in only two details: hair and name. Noa kept her shiny black skull shaved clean, like a chess piece, whereas this “Sadie” creature had had her kinky African hairs straightened into a flowing chemical mane. Everything else was one-to-one. A portrait. A chiding, loving, detailed portrait.
This character “Sadie” moves from a relationship with a loutish German who suffers, occasionally, from diabetic seizures, to a portly British artist named Simon, of all things, who’s worried about his career, and who, therefore, deliberately provokes Muslims with anti-Islamic paintings in order to trigger global fame (though the fact was, in Victor’s case, Muslims had come out, to everyone’s shock, to say how much they liked the non-representational paintings, though you couldn’t count on such reasonableness in all of them). Wasn’t it true that Noa used to joke that the only thing she missed about her German ex was how sweet his diabetic semen was? Like blowing the Easter Bunny?
His next move is tracking down the publisher.
What really gets to Victor is the possibility that this pseudonymous writer prick (N.E. Boddhi: har har) has noticed a cute little detail about Noa that Victor himself hasn’t. Is Noa’s penmanship really so awful?
Even worse is the possibility of a coded irony; that the prickscribe finds her penmanship exquisite, rather, and had written odes to it or perhaps…yes…Noa had written out inspiring quotes for him like she’d once done for Victor, though she’d stopped that years ago, because that’s the sort of thing a lover only bothers with in the beginning, isn’t it? During the golden age of the affair. Before everything turns to pleasant, odorless, room-temperature shit. Victor is seriously thinking about killing his girlfriend.
He knocks again and leaves the building. Rings Tod. Is Tod early? Late? Still looking for parking? Is Simon with him?
Love and Death: the oft-invoked twins. Eros and Thanatos. But that’s wrong. The dark twin of Sex isn’t Death, but Murder.
Item: Victor and Tod watch as a skinny old man slips into the bistro. Skinny old man in dark clothing with a white beard and a zombie’s grin. One of those U-Bahn pests they both recognize from twenty years ago, before they could afford big cars, or baronial flats so near to everything that they could afford the luxury of walking. Old man’s toting a heavy briefcase with the words Ask Me About Jesus stenciled on it. The fact that even snob joints like Chez Guevara don’t have the guts to hustle beggars postfuckinghaste off the premises Victor construes as yet another of the many delayed reactions, in Berlin’s daily life, to Nazism.
Tod, in his trademark suit and sandals, rolls his eyes and tells Victor a story while they wait for Simon to show up.
“Big investor with his, umm, trophy nanny asks Manny,” Tod’s gallerist, “for the most au courant, cutting-edge, oven-fresh , umm, Tod Spectre money can buy. He wants to be ahead of the pack and, umm, money is simply no object… he wants tomorrow’s work and he’s willing to pay for the privilege. Manny takes him back to the vault and shows him the thing that’s not even ready yet… a kid up in Hamburg is still hammering out the, umm, code. The Jehovah Virus. You know, it’s not even a material object… it’s a lot of ohs and ones floating in this shiny silver dog-dick dongle, right? Manny quotes a price and the collector goes, umm, white. Even the, umm, nanny goes white.”
Tod, who made it a habit to bring a snack along whenever he lunched at Chez Guevara (because the service was that bad) offered Victor a bite of his Snickers bar. Victor declined and watched Tod finish it off, talking while chewing it, the webbed filaments of caramel stitching his pallet to a writhing tongue.
“But, umm, he wrote the check. Manny had an orgasm when the guy signed it.”
Tod’s unfinished face. A department store mannequin grinning at the perimeter of the boyswear department by the uncanny red glow of the Exit sign after midnight… that wise-baby face under all that brutally-dyed black hair. Well, it looked unfinished to Victor but Victor thought the same of most white faces, his own included, and if Tod’s appeared a little less finished-looking than most it was because Tod’s was so white. Despite the lunchmeat tan. Tod had thrown a heavy chunk of his considerable fortune at the shadow on the wall called aging; tithing for the Mirror God; with the result that he looked not young but unborn. Speaking of investments. Victor, Tod and Simon were a consortium of friends who’d invested heavily in the fortification and de-snaking of a snake-infested island in the Indian Ocean. As a hedge against apocalypse. Once owned by the writer Paul Bowles.
Simon (portly, bearded, Jewish) shouldered in past the elderly Jesus freak (who merely stood there with that Ask Me About Jesus briefcase, beaming at everyone) waving a paperback edition of that book, yelling something about a lawsuit.
He said
Then a ripping fang of heat (eyelid-erasing light) and the wind and noise of a locomotive dropped on the I.M. Pei addition to the Louvre as they all finally merged before dissipating. First Christian suicide bombing of the etc.
3
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.”
Item: Vic is damned to embody this last passage forever.
Item: Simon senses Vic’s presence whenever Nelke sucks Simon off.
After the success of her first collection, No-No starts her novel.
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DOWNLOAD THIS STORY IN PDF FORM HERE
Hi , don’t mean to be a lurker as such…just don’t feel I have much meaningful or interesting to say. Keep it up though. There’s plenty interesting for me to read here…
[Ed.'s note: Sorry about that, Comrade Karl… I just noticed, for the first time, last night, that I could customize the “LEAVE A REPLY” bit… nothing meant by it! (larf). Have changed it to something less imperative…]
SA! Are you au fait with Adam Curtis? I’m sure you must be.
His latest three part series ” All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” ( just finished ) was pretty good. The sort of provocation that the BBC and ITV didn’t bat much of an eyelid over in the 60′s and 70′s.
Sometimes he’s a bit too obsessed with tying everything together ( i’m happy with a few loose ends at times ) but he hits nails on the head more often than not. The programme this week tied evolutionary biology together with colonial politics to show how Belgium created the Rwandan nightmare. I’m kind of familiar with the arguments but it was good to see something like that on TV as well as being an example of how tying things together works
Otherwise touring duties carry on, I’m listening to my partner laugh her head off at Infinite Jest and I’m wondering why my body has succumbed to attacks of eczema. I’m told it’s not diet-related so I just have to make sure no-one eating outdoors is down-wind from me.
You’ve got all these Twitter/Facebook offers too. worse than eczema.
Comrade DJ Sensei ET! Until a few days ago, I only thought about Adam Curtis roughly twice every five years (I’ve seen two of his films in the past five years). In the past few days I’ve gotten emails from several friends putting your question, in a less elegant form, to me (“Ever hear of Adam Curtis?”). Most of “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” is blocked here (who’d have thought that copyright law would end up being the most effective censorship tool?) but I managed to watch a 59-minute chunk and it seems tighter, less impressionistic, than the other films of his I’d seen. Good stuff, yes. I agree with your complaint about his Unified Field Theory compulsion: that need (to tie it all up in the end) sinks a lot of theoretical frameworks in the “How the Man Behind the Curtain Really Works” community, in my opinion. The inner-logic of Fairy Tales demands that kind of symmetry and closure but Real People are always sloppier, more confused, conflicted and compelled by the random than Goldilocks and her Bears could ever hope to be.
“The programme this week tied evolutionary biology together with colonial politics to show how Belgium created the Rwandan nightmare.” Yeah, I’d like to find that one but no luck yet!
Re: eczema: I always think of The Singing Detective (Michael Gambon version). Have I already mentioned that you shouldn’t eat margarine? It’ll fuck you up.
.
UPDATE:
To everyone who has commented favorably on the story I posted three or four comments above: I thank ye. This is just to add that I fucked up, a bit, in that I had meant to link (inter-textual context!) to another story, in the following sentence, but forgot to:
.
“More than the dedication, it was the last offering in the collection which gave Victor his hairs-on-the-back-of-his-neck moment.”
Steven, I was intrigued enough by Curtis to check out some of his earlier work: The Century of Self, a four-parter which looked at the Freud clan (one of whom is married to Rupert Murdoch’s daughter and is blighting public discourse here in the UK even as we speak) but especially the career of Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, the father of ‘public relations’, who used his uncle’s theories of the subconscious to sell, subvert and persuade. All rather sinister stuff, perhaps all the more so for his (Bernays’) unabashed (read: proud) admissions of same .
Also watched ‘The Trap’, a four-parter that examines the disasters that follow on from reducing people to statistics and detached, ‘predictable’ numbers/factors in equations. I thought it was very good. I’ll burn them and pass them along to you, if you like.
Sounds grand, M! Do pass ‘em over, then!
Will do. Pass along your snail-mail address to:
errolsflynt@gmail.com
…and I’ll shoot those over.
The Century of Self is the best one Curtis has done. Or at least the best one of his i’ve seen. He did one for the Manchester Int. Festival 4 or 5 years ago about the horror of middlebrow America that i didn’t see but which everyone who did raved about. I think he mixes surface inanity with subversive ideas very effectively.
It was part of a theatre installation show and not having to smooth corners for TV probably helped make it stronger.
[ed.'s note: interesting distinction, Comrade ET and I'm fairly eager to see it]
“Extraordinary Claims demand Irrefutable Evidence; how They turned you around was by re-defining your Refutation as a Claim and their Claims as Givens. Take back Logic, empower your Common Sense, re-acquaint yourself with the Plausible, the Probable and the Actual.”
Le Cœur de bœuf
DEPT OF FROM A TRUE LETTER TO AN ERSTWHILE FRIEND
“I will not now info-dump you with family data. We’re happy and Offsprung’s a delightful, self-confident master of her computer (my hand-me-down from 2006): that’s all I need to say. After participating in Facebook, as a sort of experiment, for several years now, I can tell you that the aggressive vapidity of people being amateur PR flacks for their kids’ normative accomplishments is too much for me to bear or inflict upon others. Though there aren’t really a helluva lot of normative programs going on in this household to report on.
“A friend-of-a-facebook friend posted a picture of himself (the last time I saw this man was in 1989) with a new haircut. The man is a salon owner (well-off) who was that sort of flowing-lock’d, hetero-hairdresser-type of Brit when I first saw him. Now he is (in this photo) wizened, asexual, Don-Knotts-esque, etc., plus he’s losing his hair (therefore the buzz cut). Which is fine, because he must be about 60, by now, and we are not immortals. But the point of my digression: because he’s rich and “powerful” (in a salon-owning way) he got about 20 supportive comments for the picture he’d posted. Here are a few (verbatim):
“Cue: sound of retching. Ie: what a plopping load of utter bullshit. Or “rubbish”, as the target, himself, would say (if he were being frank). I’m not suggesting that those people should have commented with cruel honesty; I’m just suggesting that a 60-year-old man has no business posting a photo like that and expecting reassurance. Why does he need to post it at all?
“What used to be the occasional little-white-lie of inter-acquaintance diplomacy is now a full time (unpaid) job! The example I provide, above, is the intersection of this reality-subverting pathology and the industrial-level ass-kissing I’ve also noticed on Facebook (minor celebrities who are friends-of-friends tend to get roughly 5-10x the number of comments on their posts, even if their “friends” collection is roughly the same number).
“So, nothing like that out of me. I just don’t want to care about what I look like, at this age (I’m not saying that because I look hideous, because I doubt that I do, quite yet… but I’m sure I look old, because I am old). I still have a reassuring amount of existential angst about smelling bad or dressing like a hobo, of course, so I continue to avoid both. But, Christ, give me a break, I’m a bookish type… when do I get to stop auditioning as an extra in a pop video? If you know what I mean.
“If I were a tekkie I’d start EFFACEBOOK for brainy over-50s with no interest in commenting on rigorously-posed camera-phone photos.
Beloved Wife was at some music-schmooze-function and a rich woman with extensive face-work arrived, looking like a mutant blond bipedal cat in a roaring wind tunnel. And I said: that proves that this “class difference” thing is still just a dream. Fifty years from now, when riches can buy for a 65-year-old woman the ability to really look like a 20-year-old, there will finally be a concrete meaning for “Upper Class” that isn’t just shaded by nuance and folklore. Donald Trump is worth a billion yet he still resorts to an embarrassing combover and that’s real (ie biological) Socialism. He’s only different by degree, not category! Wait until a billion can buy you immortality. That’s when the word “Class” will finally mean something deeply horrible. Mortality is still our Collectivist leveler. I mean, sure, a $50,000 wristwatch is beyond my means, but it’s only mass-hypnosis that has anyone thinking they need one.”
In one of William Gibson’s early books (Neuromancer, I think), one of the protagonists, a female art dealer/curator/historian is commissioned, by an immensely wealthy man, to find the maker of these Cornell-like boxes that seem to offer answers to profound questions.
The zillionaire (Virek?) appears as a hologram/simulacrum and explains to the woman that his corporeal body is a vast and growing mass of cancerous cells residing in a vat in Stockholm. At this point, the woman realises that the very rich are not merely ‘different’ but have become completely alien. Good book. Good trilogy, actually…
Iggy Pop has changed hasn’t he?
[ed.'s note: you mean "doable", ET; he looks quite tasty as a post-Fukushima blond]
SA For once I’m lost for words. He certainly looks better as Myra Breckinridge.
I saw him at Roskilde, a Danish festival where we worked about 8 years ago ( Vague precision there – so typically British ).
He came on and said “Hello Stuttgart!” He was with the Stooges and was absolutely awful. Even on a “so bad it was good” measuring scale.
I seem to remember the Stooges were a sort of breath of fresh air first time round but this was third rate pub rock with a manchild poncing about and not even as good as that sounds.
You’re supposed to be face-melting drunk and sliding sideways against several pairs of muddy aggressive boobs for the show to work, ET. Thought you knew, man.
aha so that’s where I went wrong. A book of Queneau’s sonnets tucked under my left arm whilst my right hand kept my lorgnette perched on my nose was obviously the wrong attire. The mud ruined my Persian slippers too.
Still Iggy wasn’t as bad as Santana were. I’m a big fan of percussion but a 20 minute bongo solo tested my patience to destruction. It started when I joined the line of rock’n'roll lawyers ( Hawaiian shirts, bald pates and ponytails almost to a man ) off-site to get paid and was still dribbling on when I’d got paid and joined the rest of the team to leave the festival site for some PEACE AND QUIET.
Facebook appears to have tapped into an extraordinary need to communicate something/anything that borders on the pathological. I’m not sure I’m entirely immune to this impulse seeing as I’m on here swapping opinions with people I shall most likely never meet or even know the real identity of.
Perhaps you start off aloof on Facebook and end up telling strangers about your every bowel movement. I’ve no desire to join whatsoever though it seems to be a good way of spreading information about what you are up to ( I know many musicians who use it that way ) but it’s hard enough keeping one’s head free for art let alone telling strangers what your tea consisted of.
Sardines on toast since you didn’t ask.
Well, seeing as I’m sitting here in my… ooops. What was I saying? That’s it: Facebook. My use of it was strictly utilitarian, at first, ET: people I hadn’t seen or spoken with in 20+ years were suddenly easy to locate and contact. It became only slightly sinister when I noticed that some of these same people were lots more likely to post a little note, on my “wall”, than send (or respond to) a private email of the same length… a little bit like Reality TV people who can’t be bothered to do anything that isn’t being filmed (except, of course, voiding their bowels, though I’m sure that’ll change, as you point out). The other sinister aspects became apparent more gradually, one of the worst being C) people you actually know only communicating in the form of Press Releases (and actually trying to sell you things or promote their in-store appearances or those of their kids). Maybe the worst (as I mention above) is the non-stop, zero-sum, circle-jerking assault of values-subverting Orwellian doublespeak about how “gorgeous” or “beautiful” or “awesome” photographs of everyone’s people/pets/things/events are when they aren’t… they’re usually just fucking average. I guess I can’t call it Yuppie Collectivism until the tendency is thoroughly integrated into everyone’s finances, too, but that’s probably on the way with the Bitcoin.
The press release syndrome seems to have affected written communication as well. I’m lucky enough to have friends who don’t feel the need to impersonally tell me what they’ve been up to in 2010 every Xmas in a generic printed off round-robin letter but maybe if I was to track them down on Fackbook ( spelling mistake but I like it! ) it would be a different story.
I wonder whether the urge to say ( or write ) “awesome” at anything is a recognised medical condition? When we last worked in the States in 1999 my partner got quite murderous over the deluge of “Awesome!”s aimed our way. It’s stopped meaning anything and has become like a burp or the sort of thing you inadvertantly utter when you’ve stubbed your toe.
Gearing up for “Infinite Jest”. My partner is on a Foster Wallace binge at the moment. The story about the guy who utters “Victory for the Democratic Forces!” every time he ejaculates is a genuinely laugh out loud piece of work. Aw……errm.
[ed.'s note:
LOL
]
The People’s Found Facebook Free Verse
During the Iraq war I went
on a TV strike because the news was
so negative. I put the TV
in the closet and ended
up watching TV
in the closet. So much
for a TV Strike
-HG
THIS IS THE BRAVE and INFORMED WOMAN THAT A “SOCIALIST” OF MY VIRTUAL ACQUAINTANCE ONCE REFERRED TO AS A “WHACK-JOB”; WELL, BETTER A “WHACK-JOB” THAN A DUPE OR A WANNABE HACKADEMIC SELL-OUT, COMRADE:
Good stuff…although I had a moment of discomfort when she says that black Americans are ‘…drawing a line in the sand…’ because Obama was bombing Africa. It gave the (entirely unintentional, I know) impression that black Americans are only outraged when fellow blacks are being bombed.
She also seems to be a bit naive, re: African history (she’s surprised and repulsed by the fact that ‘Africans who look like Ghaddafi are fighting Africans who look like me…’
Africa, on the whole, has always been divided on tribal lines (like, albeit often less overtly, most of the world). Many of the conflicts both past and present spring from the colonial powers dividing territories on what they thought was a rational basis (‘OK, here’s a river: that’ll be a good border; here’s a mountain range: good border etc etc’). Usually ended catastrophically because tribal boundaries were very differently delineated.
A very minor point, though.
Who is she? Well, whoever she is, speaking as a connoisseur of ‘whack-jobs’, she exhibits no symptoms. Unlike, say, Obama, who has, in deed, contradicted virtually everything he said when campaigning; or the likes of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Oprah Winfrey and many, many other prominent black Americans [ed.'s note: known as KOCs or "Kapos of Color"] who refused to acknowledge the real issues behind the pitiful, drawn-out agony of poor Michael Jackson.
Instead of standing up and saying (as I believe) Michael Jackson’s entire tragedy, up to and including his death, was the almost inevitable consequence of a sensitive and troubled man trying to reconcile and adapt (physically, if necessary) to a deeply racist society.
Indeed, M, I was a little wincey when she introduced identity politics into that talk but that’s the level that seems to work best with Das Volk (he sniffed)… the lofty abstraction of objective morality doesn’t get much traction in most neighborhoods. Being somewhat of a nut I can work myself into a genuine rage over the killing of kids who look nothing like my own, in a town/country with no familiar landmarks, even when my local economy is “good”… I wish that neurosis of mine were contagious. But, whether McKinney’s indulgence in that was a calculated attempt to motivate or a genuine reflex, she’s brave and decent and informed and rational and there I was feeling rage, again, when some cozy, well-fed Socialist intellectual in D.C. dismissed her, casually, in my Facebook as a whack-job who “gets her news from the National Enquirer”. That’s what Faux Dissent sounds like when it confronts (and is shamed by) the genuine article. As for who McKinney is:
UPDATE: WELL FANCY FUCKIN THAT
SEE HERE: http://staugustine2.wordpress.com/2010/10/27/the-endless-thread-8-0/comment-page-1/#comment-4165
GOOD FOR A RETROACTIVE LAUGH: http://tinyurl.com/635w95l
This might amuse you: my reply to one of the worst ‘ String Up S-K’ offenders on a blog where the sisterhood knew he was guilty 5 fucking minutes after the incident was revealed in the news. One of them is trying desperately to salvage something from the wreckage–now read on:
‘…according to her defence there is still the evidence of the maid’s ripped and torn stockings, for example.’
And of course, @MsChin, they must have been torn by a fat, elderly, sex-crazed
Frenchman on his way to lunch with his daughter… because those hot-blooded continental-types…bof…what would you? Or perhaps there’s another, simpler, Occam’s Razor-type explanation…
It’s what used to be called ‘the badger game’. As wiki puts it:
All the useful idiots who were baying for S-K’s blood should read THIS. How many of the remarks made in this vile monument to hysterical bigotry and nadir of journalistic integrity did I see repeated or reflected in comments by ‘liberals’ and ‘leftists’ and ‘Mr Valiant-for-Truth’ manqués, some of them, sadly, on this blog? All happily joining Uncle Rupert’s marching band. Sweet. Kelvin McKenzie must have been creaming in his jeans.
“Oh, he has form…” was given the Goebbels/Blair/Bush treatment: repeat something often enough and it becomes the ‘truth’. But anyone who actually bothered to try to source this claim quickly discovered that with one exception, it was a case of: ‘…it’s widely known…’ and ‘…many people say…’ and ‘…it’s common knowledge that…’ etc etc ad nauseum; in other words, gossip, rumour, hearsay and innuendo.
I hate the fat bastard’s guts. Imagine how all the people he stepped on in his climb to the top felt? A chance to get the knife in was too good to pass and they became ‘…people…sources…many…’.
The one person who actually came forward claimed that S-K had assaulted her some 10 years previously and that she had met with a lawyer to examine her options. I waited for the lawyer to be named and wheeled-out to confirm her story: no dice. The only corroboration she offered was…wait for it…her mother. A totally unbiased non-witness repeating hearsay (or simply lying–parents have been known to do that for off-spring, you know).
I loathe Strauss-Kahn and would happily see him in prison for the war on the poor that he’s spent years waging. I wouldn’t piss in face if his nostrils were on fire. But just because I detest a man, doesn’t mean abandoning my critical faculties or my distaste for mob-rule and lynchings.
A lot of people, some who post here and many who post at the exciting new Hello!-Grauniad-Unum Newsletter should be ashamed but I doubt they will be. I could emulate the almost-comically creepy BiteTheBum and dredge-up some of the more disgraceful comments but why bother? I expect they’ll come up with the same kind of conspiracy theories in support of the ‘poor, virtuous, working-class black chambermaid’ that they were so quick to scorn when they were deployed to explain S-K’s imbroglio. Of course, he’s a rich, white fat fuck: he must be a rapist.
Fucking bourgeois ‘liberal’ ‘leftists’: they could teach that wanker Pie Face Cameron a thing or two about brass-necked duplicity and hypocrisy. Keep the Red Flag flying, comrades…but not too high or too assertively lest it spook their ‘leader’, ‘Red’ Ed Milliblair. There’s a man after their own shrivelled, shop-worn nod-along-with-Rupert hearts.
Worthy prosecution, M, but you know those types… justice/reason/truth are solely their possessions, by default, and they stick their fingers in their ears and go la la la la forever. An utterly alien concept to them is how you and I can be outraged, on DSK’s behalf, at the injustice done against him… while loathing what we know of the man and what he stands for (though this is interesting); part of it, in this case, is that I don’t enjoy watching the Bluenoses equate a history of “Womanizing” with a propensity to Rape. Coming to conclusions about Right and Wrong (or True/False) based on Like or Dislike is fucking childish and fucking childish they are. If there’s one precious resource we are in a crisis over losing it’s Maturity.
Beyond the matter of my problem with injustice, though, is my refusal to be a Dupe; in light of what I know of the world, in my longish trek across its surface, the whole DSK thing was reading as just too fishy. What’s going to happen now is that it will all be pinned on the maid (funny how her Poor African Saint Card can be flipped to Wiley African Criminal with zero effort). But I’d still like to know how DSK’s right-wing enemies, in France, were Tweeting about it before it went to Press.
PS You have to wonder why the fat rich bastard wasn’t smart enough to film the encounter on his i-phone; or maybe he was and that’s why the phone went missing…?
I actually feel sorry for the woman. The DA’s office is now revealing that she lied about being gang-raped in Guinea when she was applying for asylum. Naturally, a lot of half-wits will jump on this: “See? It’s not the first time she’s falsely cried ‘rape’…”. But that bullshit doesn’t cut any ice with me, any more than the earlier revelation by S-K’s defence team (a few weeks back) that she had dodged paying tax in Guinea. That one made me laugh/spit.
What the fuck does her tax-paying status have to do with anything. Of course, it was just the usual dirty game of trying to discredit a witness. I dislike attempts to railroad people, whether it’s S-K or the woman involved. As for her false rape claim: well, shit, she was applying for asylum and that’s how the game’s played. Being gang-raped is worth X number of points towards a successful application. I don’t see that as any more relevant than her tax-status in Guinea.
What I found depressing/baffling was the number of otherwise reasonably intelligent people who felt that one had to take one side or the other and that in doing so, one revealed one fucking thing or the other about one’s politics or misogyny or feminist credentials or some such horseshit.
They just couldn’t seem to grasp that I (like you and any rational person) was viewing it all as dispassionately as I could, trying to work out what it was really all about, as opposed to what it purported to be all about.
I have an awful feeling that the woman has been played for a mug and is about to get fed into the meat-grinder, having served what I think was her purpose and served it well, as one can see here:
‘People’ aren’t going to ‘forgive’ him? ‘Forgive’ him for what, exactly? Fuck it anyway: his reputation is ‘tarnished forever’. Well, exactly. Job done.
PS: One can’t help noting that the two vox pops happy to try, convict and sentence a man on hearsay in the court of tabloid journalism are both in the legal profession. Christ…
When will Das Volk grasp that Dirty Tricks are a profession with budgets in the billions and stakes in the trillions? They think of the officially-confirmed conspiracies as flukes; as one-offs by bad apples. Which is the cleverest manipulation of all: to convince the Hoi Polloi that Power is fundamentally benign. In what Universe?
I can imagine an interesting scholarly-historical work called PATSIES. Can you imagine how many thick volumes it would take? To counteract the fairytale of History as a randomly-directed, organic crystal and re-direct all our suspicions towards the powerful, self-interested actors that have been fighting over the steering wheel since before the fucking Aztecs.
Nauseating, no? It’s like trying to teach the metric system to a goldfish. Fucking Bernays, right? It’s why we’re in the mess we’re in: Das Volk aren’t rational. They are far too easy to manipulate. It’s not even the injustice that outrages me, in the end… it’s the credulity. Everything we “know” about The State is taught to us, from a young age, by… The State. Neat little arrangement.
I’ve fallen for one or two manipulations myself, of course (eg I was actually inspired by Assange for a nano second… until I began asking myself: if he’s such a danger, why is he A) world-famous B) alive?) … but I always righted myself the moment I had access to enough info. The main problem with Das Volk being that the lazy, selfish fucking bastards never seek out information or do more than sneer at it when it’s more than (or contradicts) what they (think) they already know. They accept the swill they are fed and wallow in their lot and wiggle their rumps when the farmer comes around, every hour, to chose candidates for the abattoir.
As Walt says, “Resist much, obey little…”.
Lucky, pre-Bernays Walt!
A personal story. A few days after Obama’s poll-boosting Osama-skit, I was walking with a friend. I made a casual joke about the corpseless “assassination” of the anti-Santa. Said friend reacted with mild bafflement: what was I implying? Said friend had fallen for it “hook, line and sinker” as they say.
Needless to say I was disgusted… not so much at his credulity (not two sentences in that narrative add up; the story is bizarre; if a civilian murder trial were based on the evidence presented, the prosecution would be laughed out of court) but the fact that when I pressed him to explain why he believed in the narrative, he only kept repeating (with repeated shrugs): “Because I do.”
“I dunno. I just do.”
This from an otherwise educated and intelligent man. He hadn’t done a bit of reading (serious or otherwise) on the matter; not a bit. He’d scanned a few headlines and listened to a few pundits. And that was all he needed to form an opinion it was imfuckingpossible to budge him from.
But then, I can remember arguing with someone else, fairly heatedly, about the Gulf of Tonkin event… until, about fifteen minutes into it, this person revealed that, until I’d mentioned it, he’d never actually heard of it. In other words, I was arguing with The State by Proxy. Which is futile.
Apropos of nothing really, except that the ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ is almost certainly an express locomotive…have you ever read Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner? I read it in my early 20s on the recommendation of an older friend, a jazz drummer who was teaching at the Berklee College of Music when I met him. He was the first black American whom I knew intimately well, despite his being about 15 years older than me and he was one of my closest friends for almost 10 years (until he he was killed in a car accident in Vermont).
He was a lovely man who taught me an enormous amount, especially about music. He also introduced me to Mencken, John Cage, Sun Ra, Lord Buckley, Lenny Bruce, Bob and Ray, John Berryman, cribbage, E.B. White, Sara Vaughan, The Last Poets, Julie London, Chester Himes, Jelly Roll Morton…and a lot more besides.
He was, in addition, a smash with women. A tall, strikingly handsome man, with a killer smile and a deep baritone voice, the body of an Olympic swimmer, a vast fund of knowledge about a hugely broad array of subjects (like all genuinely interesting people, he was endlessly interested himself) that he discussed wittily at the drop of a hint. He was generous in every way that it’s possible to be generous. I modelled myself on him shamelessly and it was deeply flattering and encouraging that he saw something worthwhile in me.
I cried like a baby when he was killed. I think I was more broken-up about it than his girlfriend, a drop-dead beautiful jazz-dancer. Then again, I’d known him longer. I could never repay the debt I owed him, the debt a pupil owes a great teacher, although in gratitude, I tried (and am still trying) to be a better man than my nature inclines me to. He could quote great chunks of Thoreau’s Walden from memory and although he couldn’t resist poking fun at some of Thoreau’s conceits, he felt a deep personal connection with and a great and abiding affection for Thoreau. It’s one of the many things he passed on to me.
Jesus…I don’t know why I’m telling you all this; the thought of Stand On Zanzibar, a book Brian found horrifyingly plausible, breached the memory dam…sorry.
[ed.'s note: What a luvly (and resonant, but in an unexpected way: more on that later) comment, M! In a few hours I'll have enough time (if Offsprung gets to bed at a merciful hour) to do it justice with a real response...]
Comrades Lorking and Explicit!
I’ve been rare around here, abducted by meatspace. As the chief composer/arranger/ tactician and videographer of Beloved-Wife’s New Musical Project, I just don’t have the time to water this Virtual Plant called TET. The Band is going fantastically-well (last night was the Official Premier: went swimmingly); the work is hard but the bumps are few and operating a quasi-classical, Brechtian, cabaret-style act in the darkest capital of Europe, as a family business, is a life-long dream of mine so fanciful that I never dared admit it to myself… until it began to happen (the only dream I’ve ever had that was more fanciful was called “Living in a Lighthouse”). Even Offsprung can sing a refrain or two from the songbook…
Well, this twee fantasy only took roughly 35 years (counting from the first All-Night Fellini Festival I ever caught in an Art-house Repertory Cinema on the East Coast in long-lost 1977) to happen…
Until the band is fully-functional without me (and the royalty checks are rolling in) I am the custodial ghost of TET. Here’s a ranty compilation of opinions, pertaining to texts, as a memento…
AUGUSTINE’S COLLECTED RANDOM LIT CRIT Vol 1
http://staugustinian.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/augustines-collected-random-lit-crit-vol-1.pdf
PS please wink at any typos or flamboyant misspellings therein: I couldn’t afford to hire myself as a full-time editor
i’m gonna start at the Very Beginning & methodically work my way though TET steve-o
& no longer be just a fookin lurker
even though i fookin lurv* fookin lurkin
*annie hall allusion of course
[ed.'s note: Oh Gut Gawd, Memester! Work your way through? Sure way to give yourself a headache. Dip-and-skip-and-rifle (almanac-style) is the safest approach. Try the Virgilian Lots method: close your eyes, scroll down, put your finger on the screen and read... there]
Yes, it’s true: people between the ages of 18 and 25 these days are emotionally and intellectually… oatmeal
http://thoughtcatalog.com/2011/we-will-drink-our-coffee-and-complete-our-novels-and-lay-in-sunlight-and-sit-in-darkness/
Perhaps the goal has been to render the populace so diabolically retarded that when the Martial Law/ Internment Camps kick in, the move will be met with a sigh of relief; if so: it worked. Bring the big boot down! Chain these bunny-tards up!
We will print out this internet link, read three lines of it and then attach a tap to the bottom right hand corner of the bottom paragraph. The tap will have a spigot attached to it which when turned in an anti-clockwise direction will drain off the industrial levels of winsomeness that have been allowed to accumulate in the paragraphs above the bottom paragraph. This will take some time to do and may require the tap to be removed occasionally and replaced with a stopper, in order to wash out particularly stubborn cliches that stick to the inside and clog up the pipe. The stopper is necessary because once those winsome phrases start their downwards slide there is not much that will stop them sliding. Once successfully rinsed out the tap will be replaced and the draining away process will continue.
Once the text has been thoroughly cleaned we will read it again and discover that apart from words like “the” or “and” there is virtually nothing there. We will turn on all the lights in the room so that when we screw the print-out up into a ball and throw it in the direction of the wastepaper bin we can be assured that it actually enters the bin. If it takes three goes we will ensure that this piece of prose gets put where it deserves to be and once it’s there it will be taken out of the house ASAP. Or sooner.
ET! I see that you, too, were deeply moved by the profound, uh… vacuity? Vapidity? Is there a word in that general category that will neatly include shadings of the righteous revulsion towards 20-somethings luxuriating in the delusion that they’re privileged enough to be that empty-headed and get away with it? Yeah.
Please note that your pastiche fails by being the obvious work of a literate creature! Sorry, man! As a slapworthy airhead you suck.
It’s all very well being able to whip your daily routine into an impressionistic bit of prose but if you can’t realise that in doing so you are but 2cm away from being copy for a lifestyle ad then it’s all a bit waste of space isn’t it? .
It’s difficult of course – I’d imagine an ad exec could use Henry Darger to sell something if they wanted ( “Glandelinian by Dior – brings out the Vivian Girl in you” ) so it needs extra care when you’re putting something together which that irksome piece so totally lacks dude.
[ed.'s note: I deleted a minor comment of mine from an older part of the comment chain, which maneuver then pitched a comment of Comrade ET's forward, three months, into an utterly achronological spot... so I'm sticking it here, preferring a non-sequitur to the more odious choice of losing ET's thought, on the matter he was addressing, altogether...]
For me it’s the inability of people to consider the opposite or at least different point of view that is disappointing [said ET, last July]. It may end up confirming what you originally thought but it’s always worth doing in my experience. Obviously I don’t need to read the likes of Stalin, Pol Pot or Hitler to form opinions about them.
I think that’s what I like/love about art. Not that it reflects my own life back to me which appears to be the rationale for many people but that it allows me to enter worlds I have no experience of.
My own work isn’t political with a big P but I hope it provides a worthwhile distraction/diversion to the consumer la la land that we present the work in.
Well, that hits the bent nail on its head, doesn’t, ET? “lifestyle ad”. This is just a slice from the Consumer Continuum… buying and selling and buying-back what you’ve sold and being sold to others (with “others” to include oneself)… that’s the totality of the mindset here. The culture loop these kids are trapped in is a beast with a pipe from its mouth to its anus. Which is not to say the beast isn’t, somehow, shrinking. It stands and staggers on trembling legs and you can see its ribcage and its coat is dull and patch-bald. That’s the tragic experiment: what happens when Materialism is all they ever knew… when their Lives have been experienced/performed as Commercials and that defines the aesthetic of every Art that should have *saved* them from the shallow trap of Materialism… and then the Great Depression 2.0 sets in? And the Material is just a memory? Since they’ve managed to fuck up their Art, I guess their only recourse will be Fundamentalist Religion (that’s probably a redundant phrase). We’ll see in a few years.
To quote from the ad copy/”story” we’re lambasting here (italics applied thanks to this stupid template, which won’t block-quote without them):
Just crying out for handheld camera, jumpcuts, washed-out colors plus the same echoing-chimey guitar track they’ve used on every “indie”-youth targeted ad since the mid-9os!
THE BOMB COLLECTOR: A NOVEL
A few years ago I had the thought that, considering all the people I’ve known, very well or not very well at all, one of them must have been, statistically speaking, without anyone (living) knowing it, a murderer. How would I know? How well do we know the people we know? The careful type, of above-average intelligence, could get away with it.
Then I thought of “avant garde” Lit; how obvious the stuff usually is… it’s red-flagged with typographic gimmicks, disjunctive syntax, silly characters and/or situations, etc. Surely there are subtler ways to smuggle the aesthetically uncanny onto the page…?
DOWNLOAD
Oh dear… Comrade EC has been a very naughty boy…! First the Lusitania… now this…
“If you are looking for the real thing…”
What if a few of us prefer something better?
SALTER TALES: an Hallucinated Life-Cycle
DOWNLOAD HERE
In a discussion about art/music/people’s brains on the TV last night Brian Eno said that recent research shows that people’s brains are getting smaller.
I’ve met him a couple of times ( distant family connections via a marriage ) and he’s an extremely interesting man to talk to but I couldn’t help feeling that what he was saying in that interview rather confirmed the brainclaim.
He’s busy working with apps and naturally they are the way forward. Well they may well be but the way forward to what exactly? My other half says ( quite accurately I think ) that apps are like those wind-up tin toys you get in the Hawkins catalogue ( Hawkins being a UK-specific mail order firm ) – colourful, fun but essentially toys/gimmicks.
What disturbs me is how co-optable these things are through being SO connected to a particular corporation. Rather like flash-mobs which were mildly interesting when they started but then became an advertising trick seemingly without those involved even realising they were being exploited for little or no money.
Yes, I’ve read the claim that cranial capacity has been shrinking over the last 5,000 [erratum: 30,000] years, ET, but what they can’t tell from that is whether or not brains have become more efficient (or have shifted vital computational resources from the job of, say, smelling predators to the job of abstract thinking)… though I hate to think that some of the blazingly dim comments I’ve read, online, since the late-1990s, were written by people actually smarter than our ancestors. For that would make our ancestors chim… oh, wait.
The whole pop “Evolution” and “Genome” fad is just Quasi-Enlightened cover for Eugenics, though, IMO. When they started making these “discoveries” about Neanderthal/ Homo Sapiens gene-sharing, recently, I knew it was only a matter of time before various neo-Nazty forums/commenters used it for racial flamewar ammo. The Grail, of course, is being able to prove that Euros and Afros diverge on the level of species…
Re: Eno: liked his stuff from the ’70s… the Roxy and solo albums (owned most of them, as much for their covers as their tunes)… but Brian, I think (no offense meant to your distant kin, ET) is a Moneygrubbing Whore-Geek who bigs-up these ridiculous-fucking apps because A) he’s got some kind of sponsorship gig or B) he wants to seem young and really with-it, man… no fogey our Brian! Hey, Bri, maybe some platinum-selling rapper will get you to Executive-Produce, just like U2, 20 years ago…!
In the real world, having to take crash-courses in New Technology every 6-weeks for some trivial advantage like being able to make 3-D films with your phone, or speak with the Dead, or whatever, is as big a time-waster as blow (in its use as well as time spent wanting more) but at least blow doesn’t require a manual or updates. Fuck me, last time I checked, the best that most of us could hope for was c. 90 years to eat, drink, fuck, sleep, wash the dishes and change the world… who has so much extra time to waste on these proliferating apps? Wake me up for the Time Traveling app but, until then, I’m happy with my ’90s Tech (cell phone, PC, email and free porn). I have not and will not even bother with Twitter!
No offence taken SA. Whenever I’ve spoken to him I’ve always wished I liked his stuff more. We work with a sound artist who, commercially speaking hasn’t a clue and who doesn’t appear to want to have a clue either. The fact that he’s showing “I married a Foley Footstep” in an obscure venue at 1.00 this Friday lunchtime and after doing remixes for the likes of Sonic Youth and Pulp turned his back on that should give you a clue as to his talent for survival in the art world.
In comparison Brian’s experimental work seems so controlled and calculated.
re; Twitter yes exactly although a bunch of foul-mouthed tweets might be entertaining!
(It’s fitting we’re chatting about this on the day that The Steve Jobs Death App kicked in)
Eno belongs to a special category of techno-cheerleading-sellout that tends to pull enormous corporate support (as some think of U2, who, they forget, are a corporation) while appearing, to the untrained eye, to remain “funky” and outsidey and “hip”; the monk on the kind of mountaintop that comes with its own heli-pad and a standing invitation to TED TALKS.
Somehow I got my name on the mailing list of a next-generation version of Eno… DJ Spooky. The last thing DJ Spooky tried to sell me (in my baffled In-Box) was a book he was promoting at an event the address of which was 7 World Trade Center. The book has something to do with Climate Change (and a trip Spooky took to Antarctica, sponsored by whom? Al Gore?): so, to recap, Spooky is savvy enough to combine Climate Change and Ground Zero… a combination that no Normative Liberal with a good job and between 25-45 years of age, surely, could pass up. Cha-ching.
Spooky’s products (computer-music/ public pseuds-natter/ coffee table books) are Mediocrity Itself but his “message” (that we can fix things by buying things and by generally opting into the technological shit-circus of Empire) keeps him in well-made shoes. I’m sure Eno’s footwear is similar.
PS Re: “Twitter yes exactly although a bunch of foul-mouthed tweets might be entertaining!” yeah but after how long would the bloom fade on the act of tweeting the word “cunt” in combo with various adjectives and one of several imperatives? Not long, I’d think
[ed.'s note: Holy Fecking Sheet I've just noticed I started this thread... edition 8.0 of TET... in Oct of 2010 and it is very nearly a year later! We've slowed the metabolism down to a very magisterial Geologic Scale... ahhhhhh, nice... ]
Ironic that all these people HAVE to go to the South Pole in order to tell us to conserve energy.
Don’t they have an app that allows you to pretend you’re in a country?
[ed.'s note: no hipsta on Earth can pass up the fucking chance to go to the fucking Antarctic, ET, simply because it's one of two terrestrial landmasses that very few hipstas have i-padded in a coffee shop on... the other being Gary, Indiana]
This Just In (I am NOT making this up):
(“Paul D. Miller” is DJ Spooky’s personym)
or
I “like” that exclamation mark… it’s so old fashioned
the first item on Spooky’s site is:
Along with the shameless materialism (Moet!) and the cultural-shrunken-head-necklace he proudly wears and gyrates in (Tate Modern, Sonic Youth, Public Enemy) notice that Spooky connects with Zeitgeisty political power-points (Ground Zero, as I mentioned before, and, now, Arizona… which could be about immigration, the Tucson assassinations or the wild fires).
I’m just trying to find my upchuck app. Hobnob wines and Belvedere vodka will be two of the many liquids passing through my lips on their way to the floor
I’m actually conceptualizing a “Give DJ Spooky Menstrual Cramps” app at this very moment, ET! Check my TETSHOP for downloading! .005 cents of every download goes to a fund I’ve started to paper every square centimeter of some lucky Third World country with my likeness!
Nice one Steven. The haterz out there just don’t get the vibe you’re on.
btw if you need a filmcrew crew to document the papering then check me out. My CV is mash up app-style! Imagine Prodigy in Costa Rica filmed by Reuben Mamoulian starring Bud Abbott and Hannah Montana with art direction by Titian and you’re half way there!
“Stunning” -Village Voice, “There’s there there alright!” -Gertrude Stein.
Badass, Bro! [wait... what? Bud Abbott? Dayum!]
And here’s DJ Spooky going after that recent Liberal Sacred Cow and cultural phenom “Precious”… ooops… I mean…. the dangerously powerful Dick Cheney… ooops… I mean, the career-threateningly controversial subject of 9/11… ooops…. I mean… here’s DJ Spooky “attacking” the almost-comically-safe target of…
…. DW Griffith’s Birth of a Fucking Nation…?
http://youtu.be/3ljIq0lz0qY
“Ideas are some of the most incredible things we can have…”
Along with cooties, orgasms and another cup of tea, DJ Spooky! I hear ya!
I feel we need a reminder of talent at this juncture before my head replicates the one in this
http://youtu.be/LuBwXfg3Mr4
Cool, ET; was that done on an i-Pad with the old Svankmajer app…? (and why won’t the video embed?)
Oh I give up.
[ed.'s note: har]
SA your editorial touches to make me appear literate are much appreciated. You are a true gent.
DJSpooky sounds uncannily like Parisa on the Guardian Poetry blog.
“Who wants to see me give a rock to a fish…?”
POMES WE LOVE WE DIDN’T WRITE WE LOVE
18.10.08
I PREY UPON THE YOUNG/THE BEAUTIFUL/ THE BRILLIANT
glut and spindlepricker lift your
gut and finger
beckon pause flick
flickfinger (does the gesture
linger/chastise/promise/quell)
limps a little a little
a little
careless wearing
same grin you wore
when wore the blonde sheath of your
skin before
you did and do
sir as you please sir
as you please and (as
Jupiter his own son
devoured) grin and bare
your tongueclick teeth.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
14.10.08
LAMPLIGHTER
Lamplighter: I left
the bronzing brick and
sheets of steel that cut the streets
that glittered mornings left
cold night sweat in sheets, and cut
the streets with light I left you
somewhere inbetween
the lamplight left me
to imagine you
Lamplighter: I left you
pressed to drawn shades
thin sheets that pressed your sleep
into your chest, lit. Light
something, if there is something left
to be lit.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
THE SPANISH ARMADA
a machine made from summer when
there was wind in the wheat
when the seeds of the wheat
put their backs into it
(may the wind be always at
that there)
and wandered in
out of the
wandered in and out of
your hair caught in gloating
convoy of toads
like the moment the Spanish armada awoke
to spanish pears palms weighted with
pears when they lost to the sea
the wheat in the wind
wheat will not grow near the sea
pears will not grow in spain.
—kristin hayter
MUSIC TO DRESS UP IN B&W FOR
Found it difficult to watch this until I went to take my sunglasses off and realised my black polo-neck was rolled up over my eyes. Totally not from the fridge.
Until the tendons on my wrist played up I was a keen pandeiro player ( the Brazilian adaptation of the tambourine .- I could bore you further ), It’s the instrument that this music was made to accompany. You can get all the beats and use of fingertips, thumb and heel of the hand in the right places but the feel really is the elusive thing here.
We worked in Rio many years ago and there you see 10 year olds who can play the pandeiro with the right swing to it. I may have the technique but I sound like Black Sabbath’s drummer in comparison.
Still it’s a lovely thing to play and if I could find a 50′s style doo-wop group I’d offer to accompany them. It would sound perfect.
Send us a vid of you grooving on it, Comrade ET! (more detailed response after I produce dinner for Offspring)
Sadly my playing isn’t what it was SA. Carpal tunnel syndrome put paid to my ambitions so although I still enjoy playing it doesn’t have the snap it did and a video would be more provocative performance art rather than sinuous groove.
I’ll look out a YouTube of Marcus Suzano however.
And here is Marcus in action
with his wire-frame glasses, lack of hair and slight podge he could be me!
not sure about the choon but the intro is a pretty good example of the Brazilian lap-top ( as they call the pandeiro ) in action. Most Bossa Nova takes it’s languid rhythm from the instrument.
sounds like the zils are doing double-time triplets in spots!
The triplet is done with fingertip, ball of the thumb and the fleshy pad of the little finger. The technique is like a fish thrashing about on the bottom of a boat.
The bit where the audience suddenly break into applause is extremely hard to do. The left hand does all the work but the fingertip beats with the right hit the drum as it goes up and down.
The friction bits like a snare drum roll are reasonably easy to do with the fingers but the friction bit with the heel of the hand is very difficult to do. He might wax the skin to get extra friction but I don’t know of any other player who does that.
Christ I’ve turned into a nerd.
well, now, I’ve got a non-sequitur for you, Comrade ET (you, being an Ahtist, may appreciate this); I was Googling one of my favorite Ahtists (Kara Walker) and came up with this brilliant image:
… which is accompanied by this unfortunate bout of Artspeak mumbo jumbo:
Which is just so patently wrong. The piece is obviously about Hair (and race)!
I must confess I’m not getting master and slave, I’m not getting the pushmepullyou of black and white shapes ( it’s black on a white background all the way for me ) but my immediate reference was Lotte Reiniger’s films of shadow-puppet fairy tale plays which has made the man-faced sheep difficult to dislodge in my mind when I look at it.
What a good artist though – to my shame I’d never heard of her before.
Edmunds’ “analysis” is doubly-irritating for being as “obvious” as it is wrong… “The traditionally white sheep and conventionally black slave are rendered equal by their colorless tone”… gak. Apparently, anybody is qualified to write this stuff.
I’ve actually got references to Walker peppered across every edition of TET; here’s one, upthread: http://staugustine2.wordpress.com/2010/10/27/the-endless-thread-8-0/comment-page-1/#comment-3914
and
http://www.sfmoma.org/explore/multimedia/videos/226?autoplay=true
What’s sickening is the number of times I’ve left complimentary comments on YouTubes of Walker’s Art, only to have PC-Retards (both Black and White) attack the compliments because they (the attackers) are too childish/ thick/ immune to real Art to “permit” anything weightier than “uplifting” pablum and lullabies…
… which segues nicely into the post below…!
I meant to carry this on a bit further but the server went down last night and we were forced to make our own entertainment.
I would have thought the fact that Walker uses silhouette is highly significant. it’s hardly touched on in the piece above which instead regurgitates a few pet fave themes of the writer.
Is Walker also making a feminist statement by using an art-form seen as feminine, very minor and incapable of holding weighty themes?
By using a form that has connotations of parlour games is she evoking an 18th century drawing room where racism was perhaps more overt than it is now?
It also appears to be a bit of an assault on the psychoanalysts that use Rorschach ink-blots as an indicator.
Oh, [he exclaimed, puffing his pipe] she’s plugging directly into, and confronting, and tinkering with, the living energy of Plantation-era America, which has not faded in force but grows as America grows (as a population and a womb of global populist trends); the Antebellum Pantheon of archetypes is all there. To go back to the sheep (with its wool) and its awful weight on that beautiful (she is fetching in silhouette) woman’s back, bringing the suffering of its weight and the shame of its animal associations (and shitting!): “kinky” hair is no small thing in America (or even in the “Western” world and beyond) but a powerful symbol and divider. 85% of all Black women you will ever see in American movies/ TV and in Wallmarts and BMW dealerships and McDonalds and the White House have taken the time and expense to straighten their hair… it’s more than an ephemeral fashion choice. It’s almost like seeing people with Germanic accents wandering around NY, in the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, with numbers tattooed on their wrists: if you’d only seen (or heard of) one you’d think nothing of it. Or supposing all the citizens of Tokyo got that surgery to make their epicanthic specialness go away…? We’d probably notice and comment.
The beauty of mining such a cleanly powerful (and simple) visual strategy is that so much can be projected on it; so many layers of metaphor. The Rorschach is there, the reference to “minor” “feminine” arts (on a par with playing the Spinet), the quality of cinema and old still photography both…
It’s just too bad people (Americans especially) no longer generally understand/appreciate what Art is and think of it, now, as merely therapeutic, or entertaining, or decorative self-expression… which anyone with enough time on his/her hands, and the “right attitude”, can do. Which is why so much shitty crafts-fair mediocrity gets Facebook “likes” while challengingly adult work like Kara Walker’s is under relentless attack, Comrade ET!
God knows I like a spot of entertainment myself but the idea that art is an experience as much as anything else does seem to be disappearing.
Last week I went to see a retrospective of Magritte. He’s a terrible painter, most of the paintings in the last 20 years of his life are really awful yet there are some paintings that completely capture the oddness of dreams. The huge apple in the room is little more than an illustration yet the idea works – the apple has a presence that you can almost hear.
We spent the afternoon wondering why his stuff works – he gives you enough reasons as to why it wouldn’t work. The fact that he wasn’t consistent makes the mystery even richer if anything.
[ed.'s note: agreed, Comrade ET. On a technical level Magritte was just a step over Rousseau... so his naive vision, like Henri's, remained unmolested by sophisticated theories and techniques and pure as a boyscout's hobby. You can see right through the paint into the man's Tin Tin (sic)-reading nightmind. I'd posit a troika of Rousseau-Magritte-de Chirico... the Surrealists I'd most expect to have model trains running in their basements!]
This comment appears to anticipate the one I’m replying to ( the Reply button clearly influenced by Surrealist parlour games ). No model-trains in my basement but I grew up with Tintin so add me to the list and chuck it on the pile.
Many Tintinophiles are claiming Spielberg has ruined their childhoods with the release of his latest film. Clearly they never saw the Herge sanctioned live action films of the 60′s. Absolutely dreadful.
Spielberg’s film just looks creepy and an attempt to make an Indiana Jones film by any other means. The live action Tintin films feature a man-child with an unruly quiff with Paul McCarthy’s sea captain in tow and a dog that is difficult to keep in the frame. They are the stuff of nightmares.
[ed.'s note to ed: A) indeed, what *is* up with that 'Reply' button? B) Paul McCarthy sea captain? Does he have genitalia on his salty face? C) I've seen a production still of the Spielberg thing to which you refer and I second the "creepy"; never a Tintin fan myself (as you can probably guess from my misspelling of his name in a post preceding this) so I don't care, really. Except to say that it's been 20+ years since I could watch anything by Spielberg and not think of the US Military. Don't know why. Oh, wait, yeah: I do know why.]
You don’t want to look too closely at the Captain’s face in case there is a genital or two protruding out of the beard.
I’ve no desire to see the Spielberg film either but was amused by the “my childhood is ruined” over-reactions. There’s a ton of rubbish to wade through before you even get to the current version.
Tintin was what made me want to draw stories in the first place so has a particular place in my development. I haven’t read them in over 30 years but they are brilliantly told stories with dodgy foreigners and racism mixed in with surprising displays of support for gypsies, native North and South Americans, the Chinese as well as antagonism towards imperial powers.
PC FOLLIES of the ANTEBELLUM or RETARDATION is COLOR-BLIND
Someone with the unimprovably self-satirizing name of LaToya has posted a moronic “article” and, being that the comment I posted, in response, is subject to moderation, I’ll post the “article” here, along with my comment, as insurance that my comment sees the light of day:
to which I replied:
Damn. This bourgeois over-reaction to Lennon’s (excellent) song just goes to show how degraded the black intelligentsia has become by corny, PC, hand-me-down sensibilities. “Radicals”? Don’t make me laugh. How can you encourage Radical or Dissident thought/speech/action when you’re censoring Art with the zealous stupidity of uptight, blue-white matrons from suburban Ohio, c. 1964?
I won’t even *go* into the internalized plantation of the mindset which thinks that only blacks can use the word “nigger”, or dictate its application (and, um, hey, if a dude is half-black, is it half-wrong for him to use the “n-word”?) This exasperating bullsh*t reminds me of the inevitable black hissy fits (the genius) Kara Walker provokes… talk about arrested development! No wonder (the hideous, slap-worthy) Tyler Perry is a billionaire. Have some more poison on that poo, Boo…?
Hell yeah, the USA is the most race-saturated hyper-propaganda field in the “developed” world and every single one of my progressive white American friends is racist on a level they can’t comprehend (owing chiefly to a lack of trying)… but how is THIS helping to combat that? Picking the softest targets, for the easiest reasons, and being *wrong*, on top of it… that doesn’t help at *all*.
Act like Intellectuals and stop privileging your “feelings” and re-learn to *think*… it was the “White Man” who put it into your heads that Negroes are More Emotional/Less Cerebral; why do you honor that socio-psycho-toxin by confirming it? Of course, the Friendly Racism of the white “progressive” encourages this false dichotomy (white brains/ black hearts) because it *flatters* them (which is why they can indulge in all that self-deprecating humor about Things White People Like… because YOU are still beneath them). Learn to be Above Things, Negroes. Stop this eternal, self-degrading appeal to the paternalistic white framework of trivial PC “justice”: it’s a rigged game. It’s costing you Precious (no pun intended) IQ points.
A word is a word is a word, Sanctimonitards, and context is everything. Now boycott Kanye (and every “black” entertainer out there) for using the “hurtful” words “bitch” and “ho”, which both, as you know, “belong to women” (@Kanye: make all royalty checks payable to… Yoko Ono).
Goddamn… it really is 1957 all over again! I blame that Halfrican in the WH (just kidding).
PS and, yes, I’m a Nigger. But I’d be happier being a Nigger if you corny, crypto-middle-class Cry Babies joined another group (I heard the Mormons are looking for converts). Please defect, thumb-suckers, and restore some grandeur and dignity to the word “Nigger”.
DRUM CIRCLES INC
(go to 20:15 for Quick Version)
MERRY NEW THANX-O-WEENMAS KWANZUKKAH
Bowdlerized, but, still…
Go to 35:00 for Truth, Lucidly Expressed
Harpal Brar (at 35:00) is one of the most methodically lucid articulators/ aggregators of The Pertinent News (and its fundamental meaning) as I’ve seen/read/heard in a very, very long time
Considering the Tsunami of Lies that we call “Mainstream Media”, isn’t it nice to think that with just a little effort, we can get an idea of what’s really going on Out There, and that there is a “Watchdog Press” (it just doesn’t come wearing a suit and a tie and a sociopath’s blinding smile)…?
to quote the video channel:
Dan Glazebrook (independent analyst), Lizzie Phelan (journalist), and Harpal Brar (politician and writer) provide much-needed analysis, counterpropaganda and polemic on ‘Libya, Africa and Imperialism’ in a public meeting convened by Oxford’s Stop the War Coalition. Phelan and Brar recently returned from Libya and provide substantial firsthand insight.
Dan Glazebrook: starts 0:11; continues 1:13:26.
Lizzie Phelan: starts 16:48; continues 1:06:07.
Harpal Brar: starts 28:42.
Tuesday, 4 October, 7.30pm — Oxford Town Hall, St Aldates, Oxford, UK.
KNOWLEDGE BECOMES POWER ONLY WHEN IT’S WITHHELD
“Nothing is but what is not.” This simple sentence made a powerful impact on me as a school boy, just as “Knowledge becomes power only when it’s withheld” would have made an impression if anyone had actually said it! (larf) The World isn’t a puzzle, but the Human Mind sees to that; riddles, secrets, intrigues, deceptions, dissemblings, obfuscations and codes are what we do best (along with unraveling same). Just ask Nabokov or Arthur Scherbius. Maybe it starts with the elemental acrostic of DNA? It certainly explains our love lives, economic system and politics. In any case… look at this man’s beautiful work:
http://web.archive.org/web/20061021192347/http://www2.localaccess.com/marlowe/best.htm
In Honor of the First Birthday of This Thread (TET 8.0) alone… Which Was Four Days Ago, Actually…
‘c’est la vie’ say the old folks, ‘it goes to show you never can tell’
hope this makes it across the electro-cyber-waves and straight into your eyes ears heart and mind SA
happy 1st Big TET 8.0
(and i’m not even a third of the way through 3.0 – i have no idea what this thread contains)
ps- i took a pic of the soup on the stovetop – it is a sight to behold – stay tuned!
MIMI’S SOUP, FINI’S HAT: DIPTYCH
+ + + + + + +
‘do you like my hat?’
‘i do! i do! i do like your hat!’
nice juxta steve-o
A GLIMPSE INTO THE CRINGE-INDUCING ABYSS of one of JAMES WOOD’S BIGGEST ARSE-LICKERS
Have a look at the video below. You expect Nige to break down about half-way through it. To tell us where the bodies are buried.
It’s bad enough that Nige chose “passion” as a topic (a cliche second only to —what?— in the public speaking game). But what kind of dim-bulb narcissist gives a 15-minute talk on the subject by dutifully reciting from an unremarkable list of events from his own unremarkable life? By the time Nigel gets to the misty-eyed remembrance of his passion for collecting memoirs of Canadian Prime Ministers (I’m not making this up), it’s obvious that something is going terribly wrong: the sound man has missed his cue! Or is the canned-laughter machine malfunctioning…?
Nigel sent me this link in a group-mail. You’d think he’d want to bury the video. If it were funnier (ie: if the pace weren’t so slow) it would surely go viral.
It’s always the ambitious idiots (Duh-Ed Champion lunges to mind) who drop “passion” into the Literary Conversation (with a mace-shaped, corn-studded plop), because “passion”, unlike talent, or hard-won ability, or taste, or intelligence… is anybody’s, at any time, to have. No luck or hard work or brutally frank self-knowledge required. And aren’t “ambition” and “passion” nearly synonymous in these cases? And I don’t mean the ambition to improve; to become closer readers or better writers or more interesting speakers.
If only Nigel had been imaginative enough to start his “talk” with the etymology of “passion”.
late 12c., “sufferings of Christ on the Cross,” from O.Fr. passion, from L.L. passionem (nom. passio) “suffering, enduring,” from stem of L. pati “to suffer, endure,” from PIE base *pei- “to hurt” (cf. Skt. pijati “reviles, scorns,” Gk. pema “suffering, misery, woe,” O.E. feond “enemy, devil,” Goth. faian “to blame”). Sense extended to sufferings of martyrs, and suffering generally, by early 13c.; meaning “strong emotion, desire” is attested from late 14c., from L.L. use of passio to render Gk. pathos. Replaced O.E. þolung (used in glosses to render L. passio), lit. “suffering,” from þolian (v.) “to endure.”
There’s something unexpectedly telling there.
PS: ["In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local,
self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like
experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine
to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local,
self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently
organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for
the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.*
(*Subject to certain rules and regulations)"]
I don’t normally take offence at avatars but I remember Nigel Beale’s pic when he wrote blogs for the Guardian used to drive me nuts. So much so that I never bothered to read what he had written.
In my head I certainly wrote an essay deconstructing the photo – narcissist posing as thoughtful critic who doesn’t pull his punches.
The video has been removed so I am none the wiser. [ed.'s note: I've found another link!]
Oh and happy birthday to TET 8.0
A) That avatar featured Nigel with a pipe, didn’t it, ET? [ed.'s note: no, as we can see, above, he's extracting his ambitious tongue for its weekly scraping ] I seem to remember feeling that everyone who saw that picture surely wanted to slap him as a result; not too hard, of course.
B) Luckily, I had the foresight to download Nigel’s vid (feeling that it was inevitable that some large-hearted casual acquaintance, or mental health professional, would urge Nige to remove it)… I’ll re-upload and re-post it when the Time Fairy grants me a visit. All in defense of Literature, obviously.
C) I do like the idea of a year-old (and counting) comment thread. Slowing the heartbeat (by having too little time to post often, these days) extends the longevity. I’ve lost most of the traffic, as a result, but what it loses in global reach, TET gains in Gemütlichkeit, man. Have another pretzel and a shoulder-rub from Heidi…?
D) Here’s some of Nigel’s BS, on the Guardian, of which you speak (from way back in 2008) and my rebuttal of it:
my comment:
noo gyumn kly gij TOSSER hkot llo ( typed whilst spluttering on the floor, fingers reaching up to computer keyboard on the table and hitting typing keys randomly – the sun rises and sets as all this takes place )
Sorry, ET… should I pixilate it a bit more?
Pick-axe it a bit more if you don’t mind SA.
Good response btw.
I’m still deep in Infinite Jest ( I’m a very slow, late at night reader ) and a few night’s back read a sequence/chapter that shines out in its use of language and ability to express oneself in language.
Wood is obviously tired of reviewing books and feels he has bigger fish to fry. A certain sort of critic often falls into the trap of narrowing the range of what they think their chosen art-form should be in order to airily dismiss anything that isn’t that.
ET, if people who read The New Yorker actually read more books and read these books well they’d never put up with Wood’s goofy proscriptions; the problem being that too many people read book reviews in lieu of reading books, now… it’s quicker to skim a review, they get to be told what to think and they feel improved… this bit applies to Yankees, of course… by the aura of some dour British cunt capable of generating sentences each containing more than one subordinate clause. The aspirational readers of the NYer are suckers for that sort of thing. Only a close-reader will pick up on the fact that Wood’s intellectual reach is limited by the reality of his thalidomide flippers.
Not that Wood’s an idiot… the idiots are his arse-suckers, like Nigel. Wood is quite right to milk the situation as long as the rubes allow it. But if any one thing undermines Wood’s actual seriousness, or usefulness, as a critic, it has to be the little blurb Wood has graced Nigel’s site with. It reads, in full:
This, remember, from the man who sneered all over Don DeLillo for writing the masterpiece Underworld. So, to recap: Wood has a problem with Don DeLillo’s style, but he gets pleasure from reading the dimly tepid (sometimes plagiarizing) droppings of his biggest arse-sucker. Which makes sense. On the other hand, we find things like this (at a place called Shigekuni):
And so the world makes sense again.
*
*
*
UPDATE
If you follow the bookchat game at all, you know that J. Lethem has just dropped a belated hit-back at J. Wood for pissing on one of his babies. Now, Wood partisans (incl. the cryptos) are very busy trying to curry favor with Cap’n Woody by hitting back at Lethem’s hit-back…
I left this comment after one of the hit-back hit-backs:
IMPOSSIBLE TALES #1: THE RING (flash ficciones on TET)
There was a bear stretched to its full standing height, perhaps even up on its tiptoes, shaking the branch of a tree (she wished she could say exactly what kind of a tree but being a city kid she couldn’t) for whatever reason that would undoubtedly make utter sense to a bear, but the thing about the bear that was truly noteworthy (and made her assume at first she was dreaming) was its tee shirt. It was easily legible in the early morning light, the letters (black on white cotton) arranged in three fat lines like a stoner’s haiku bulging across the barrel contour of the animal’s chest: That Which Does Not /Kill Me /Pisses Me Off.
Because of the animal’s great height (she wasn’t a wizz at estimating lengths and distances but it had to be nine feet tall) the dirty tee shirt appeared to be a cut-off and gave the bear, with its exposed belly (coated in rills of articulated grime like tire-ridged curbsnow), a vaguely gay appearance. Not that there’s anything wrong with a gay bear. She’d have to get off her own belly and climb out of her sleeping bag and peek from a better angle to determine the bear’s sex with any certainty and common sense advised against it. Not that curiosity wasn’t berating her with its distant, cat-killing, megaphone voice.
Her little cafeteria argument with Aaron Waldauer about bears and periods suddenly came back to haunt her with a vengeance that would have had the brat in hysterics if he had but known. A lingering toenail of moon was visible behind the bear’s ear and that plus several rindy clouds and the thickening spume of a vapor trail made Zoey think of debris in a swimming pool and the time she’d spotted a ring on the blue tiles at the bottom of the deep end and frog-kicked down to scoop it up and bring it to the surface like a pearl diver. Only to present it to Judy wrapped in lavender tissue and have Judy lose it.
Mom (who’d announced long ago that referring to her as “Judy” was perfectly acceptable, though Zoey, after toying with the option for a day or two, had reverted to the standard with a shiver of wise relief) was in one of her comas. Screwed so deep into the mass of her dreamless sleep and exhaling through a mouth like a sprung valise full of gold the rich breath of Marlboro and Merlot she reeled back again with her snore. Zoey decided against waking her. She was glad they’d been good campers: their bloody garbage was deposited in a proper receptacle downwind. She also hoped that the air horn, the primordial fire extinguisher and the Taser (on loan from a possessive Mountie) were all where she thought they were (except the fire extinguisher, which was in the car) in the tent.
A shower of pine needles from the agitated branch glittered in the bright air like a static display that continued to function a while after the bear (satisfied, frustrated or simply bored) ambled off and the bear hadn’t been gone for five minutes before Zoey began doubting what she had clearly seen and wouldn’t remember again until coming to in a fog in her flower-choked hospital suite after the mastectomy.
THREE STRUCTURAL DEFINITIONS OF RACE
from 2006
A. George Walton was born in 1809, child of a black father and white mother and died in prison about twenty eight years later, having lived as a man who was good-looking in a manner that predated all hope of appreciation, as if a painting by Yves Tanguy had found its way back to the dawn of the 19th century only to inspire baffled glares and lots of kicks in the pants, as though a kick in the pants was the only persuasive critique his critics could improvise to respond to the singularity of his appearance: the loopy curls of broth-colored hair, the tawny skin, the full lips and a high-bridged nose sporting freckles… this, remember, during an era when leaded-white faces and lips like incisions were considered the essence of beauty.
B. Von Ziegeldorff drove into town every Friday night to patronize a low club called The Chicken Shack which was famous for appealing to blacks. The drive in from his villa in a wooded, nearly-rustic suburb of Potsdam through the throb of weekend traffic often took ninety minutes, during which he either had time to nurture his grievances against society in general and women specifically or listen to an instructional cassette of Advanced English for Germans. Somewhere in the lonely vastness of his car there was also a misplaced cassette of Callas he was suddenly in the mood to hear again after a year-long estrangement from that exquisitely bullying voice, the voice of high culture, because he’d been listening to far too much soul music recently.
C. Ramses sneaks a peek at the graying blonde as she steers gravely home. Or so he assumes. She reaches over and switches on the sound system. The fantasy, obviously, is that they will do the dirty without exchanging so much as a single word and she’s afraid that Ramses will ruin it now by saying a word. She doesn’t know that Ramses Gordon knows the rules of this game so well that he might have invented it; that he can play it blindfolded and has on more than one occasion and that he is thinking, also, against the background of the anti-erotic aria from Lucia Lammermoor, how differently blacks and whites absorb the behavioral proscriptions of Christianity. How this difference has a measurable impact on the respective copulatory styles of the races. How they fuck and how we live. Their guilt and our shrugs and the sacrificial sacrament of chicken.
A. Across the broad map of his short life, having been abandoned at an early age by parents driven chiefly by sexual logic through a low-walled maze of poverty, George Walton served almost a third of his earthly existence in prison. Born James, alias George, alias Jonas, alias James, alias Burley, alias Chick or Chicken John.
B. There was one black in particular. Von Ziegeldorff had made the mistake, early on, of running after all of them at once, like a kitten in a fishpond, therefore catching none, but being observant and far from stupid he soon took note of the fact that the old hands were patiently bedding one after another of the finest specimens the club had to offer, merely by choosing one and bringing to bear a convincing ersatz of passion until the goal was achieved (or quota met) and thereafter moving on. Every black girl in the club, of course, thinks of herself as The One who will prove to be so irresistible that the game will stop with her, therefore perpetuating the game.
C. Look at this respectable middle-aged German lady, for example. The grimly determined look on her face (this is supposed to be fun, lady); the way she clutches that steering wheel as though it’s hot with current: she feels Christ’s eyes on her, his disappointment in her, his weary sneer of disgust. Her husband has no problem with her little Liebesaffären… he encourages her because it absolves him of guilt for his substantial porno expenses. Christ is not so easygoing about it. Christ is not quite so cool. He plagues her with subliminal remonstrations (in which his lips never move, spookily, but his sad eyes pierce her). She wasn’t even raised in an overtly Christian family because Germans are traditionally pagan and she believes that she believes in fucking as a kind of physical therapy. A higher form of jogging. Far more therapeutic if she fucks an Asian, a Native American, or a Black. That’s what she thinks she thinks a liberal West German should believe they feel about it. But a stern (and vaguely oriental) Christ has the last word on all that and she has to hide the physical act itself behind all kinds of masks and filters to smuggle the pleasure out of Hell like a red hot trinket between her legs without fainting.
A. As a boy the tragic mulatto was the object of lazy sport among the poor whites of his acquaintance, though when he was kicked in the seat of his dusty breeches it was as a kind of running gag or after-thought, rarely with enough force to mean tears. As a manchild George fed himself by doing odd jobs for neighbors and once spent a summer doing back-breakingly honest labor for a farmer who paid him with two counterfeit five-dollar bills. “Well nigh half of what was owing me,” as handsome James alias George alias Chicken John put it. A philosophical turning point.
B. Earletta Goins was a would-be disco singer with her own little cassette out called The Story of My Life, released by a local label, an independent based in East Berlin and on this particular Friday night Von Ziegeldorff tipped the DJ a substantial amount to play both sides of Earletta’s cassette, as well as subsidizing free beers for all the patrons in the club (about two hundred people) for the duration of the cassette’s play, making for a good mood and plenty of people on the dance floor to dance beside VZ and Earletta while they danced with attention-getting self-consciousness to her disco music, which was neither truly bad nor truly good but fell within the range of most things.
C. The bedroom smells like… what? A kitchen. It smells vaguely of chicken not fried but stewed. Disgusting. On the walls flanking the massive bed, one on each, are two large wood-framed photos meant to resemble very old oil paintings. There is one of the lady in question and the other of her husband, or what looks like her husband or could be an Ex and they are dressed up to look like an Iroquois chief and his squaw… the weak-chinned fellow sports an enormous feathered head dress. His lady, in real life the gray-haired blonde on her back on the bed with her eyes closed and her legs up like an as-yet-unstuffed Christmas goose, is black-haired and light-eyed in her sepia tone photo and neither reveal the subtlest shade of mirth, self-mockery, defensive irony or even decent embarrassment in the portraits.
A. After another period of backbreaking in the Charlestown shipyards and then aboard a fishing smack with the olfactory bloom of an African cathouse’s toilet, Walton fell in with a hook-nosed ex-convict named Symmes who mentored him in the trade of bank robbing, the craft of which George failed fully to master, being neither self-righteous nor brutal enough with his pistol, landing in prison in 1824 for a six month sentence after which he dabbled unchastened in the lighter art of the highwayman… with just as little talent. When Walton wasn’t busy being apprehended (being a mulatto in early 19th century America was a liability in the incognito game), it was easy if unremunerative work, as most of his victims chose to toss him their wallets and flee rather than tussle or risk injury at the hands of a thieving diabolical coon with freckles.
B. “I must confess,” shouted VZ, “I have never before seen a lady of your race with these green eyes of such beauty,” and he mimed his own astonishment, hands on his heart as though it might burst, for also her skin was the color of the pancakes he’d been mad for on his legendary trip across America, during which being a slave to this crude delicacy had given him an insight into the American psyche he was sure he could apply to the swift achievement of his goal.
C. Ramses imagines, quite vividly, the chin-free husband answering the telephone on one of those interminable Sundays of petty household chores choreographed to the pandering drone of television, the day on which long-married Germans speak less than a sentence to each other and he envisions the man of the household putting a hand over the receiver and lifting an eyebrow and invoking, yet again, the worn-out magic of his wife’s name as though it were a mild rebuke, tonally, or the long-suffering request to please stop something.
A. It was only when Walton came upon intended victim John Fenno, returning one evening from a dance across the old Chelsea bridge, that he met resistance and his fate. Fenno was a beefy man and sprang from his cart to wrestle Walton rather than part with his coins or jewelry, invigorated as he was by sexual frustration; had the dance been successful things may well have turned out differently; as it was, the robbery was thwarted though Walton escaped, but not before trying and failing to punish Fenno with a bullet. A suspender buckle saved Fenno’s life and doomed George as he was soon captured.
B. Driving on the fast black road towards his villa before dawn with gems of sparse precipitation fixed like glass moths to his glittering windshield, VZ found himself bedeviled by a sickening internal debate as to whether he dare risk slipping into the stereo his rediscovered cassette dub of a valuable reel-to-reel bootleg of the one-time-only performance of Callas doing Lammermoor with the notorious unscored E-flats included… punishingly high notes Callas tries for with laudable brio but misses, grazing the first E-flat with such a grasping shade of the pitch that it’s almost a blue note and chipping the second with a Levantine fraction redolent of the bazaar. In every subsequent performance she eschewed the dreaded E-flats entirely. Wisely. As far as VZ knew, he was the only one on Earth in possession of this wounded version of Donizetti’s lugubrious masterpiece, a discarded run-through of Callas’s premier performance of the piece in Mexico City, 1953, and he felt a craving just then to hear it. Despite the fact that there in the white leather seat beside him was his prize, Earletta Goins, slouched with drowsy pliancy, a half smile playing on her chewable lips, lips he fully envisioned in contact with the freckled red glans of his penis and VZ had to think long and hard before changing the sexual weather in his Porsche just then. He could only imagine the anti-aphrodisiacal effect an opera would have on this colored American sex machine. He could only imagine his future grief at never knowing the warm weight of those lips and the breathlessness of those strong brown unshaved legs crushing the breath out of him.
C. Wifey’s on her stomach, moaning and kicking, both hands locked under her thrashing pelvis making an extravagant display of humping alone. Some guy must have told her, thirty years ago, as an excuse for not touching her, that it turns him on. She’s waistless, veiny and pale as old frogs. Ramses very quietly puts his cold dangle of dick away and hitches his pants back up and sneaks out of the bedroom as the gnadige frau whips her egg into its bad-lathered glory. Down the hall and to the left the second floor bathroom door is open and sizzling with the sound of a midday shower and Ramses’s interest is piqued. Is it hubby, home early from work? A nubile daughter, out of school for the day with a chest cold? An impertinent maid, a poltergeist or a poor relation? Ramses eases up towards the invitingly open bathroom door on the plush white carpet, carrying his shoes, boldly curious, holding his breath, with little or no backup plan in place if anyone should catch him.
A. Faced with the gravity of his final punishment, Walton directed that a copy of his memoirs be bound in his own tawny skin and presented to the very Mr. Fenno whom George was sent to the gallows for trying to shoot. White historians take George Walton’s avowal that the gesture was one of esteem for Fenno’s bravery at face value, unfamiliar with the bitter nuances of colored irony. His skin, stripped in a supple parallelogram from his still-warm back after the hanging, was treated to look like a gray deer skin by the tanner, who delivered the stuff without comment to Peter Low the book binder, the latter of perhaps a less pragmatic disposition and therefore much disturbed by the job and suffering increasingly vivid nightmares the rest of his life.
B. I’ve spent so much time and money on this one dream of making sweet love with an Afro-American and on the very threshold of all that and more I decide to risk ruining the sexy mood that all of my efforts have managed by some miracle to put her into with a blast of my so-called high culture? Am I crazy?
C. What Ramses witnesses through the fogged, beaded, soap-scummed shower door is a jug-eared middle-aged black man with love handles and a sagging ass, the cheeks of which are matte and blacker than the rest of him, his large head crowned with a cap of webby, water-matted hair. Who is this man? Where does he fit in the cosmology? Was the guy in the Iroquois photo the Ex or is this the Ex and are things much kinkier around the homestead than Ramses first imagined? This avuncular apparition of a black man with the posture of an utterly defeated specimen. His left armpit foams as he scrubs at it with an eerie lack of energy more suitable to a nursing home sitz bath than a home owner’s shower; it’s like he’s preparing for his own execution. It is a joyless, prosaic, song-free ablution so full of truth that Ramses backs away from the threshold in waves of nausea and a paradoxical joy in his own life, the details of which he can claim as otherwise impossible, his uniqueness in time, the song of his soul in this skin.
TET HOUSE (the imaginary publisher) is PROUD to LINK to
[ed.'s note: the emphatically mystical Lit Machine that is Neil Addison has sent material from exotic climes... last seen doing a samba at sunrise... behold these excerpts from -and link to- his gorgeous New Thing...]
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The Little Book of Forfeits: A Foreword
The following manuscript was discovered in a beige Gola kitbag at the edge of a deep-seated lake within the confines of Martin Mere, shortly after the poet’s drowning. As such, it might be considered Frank Ahoy’s parting squib.
Splenetic, scabrous, and ultimately quixotic, time and again we find Ahoy lambasting the contemporary world within these brief pages, smiting any number of its tentacles only to witness improved versions shooting out from these same stumps in record time with renewed vigour. At some point, I believe, it must have dawned on Ahoy that far from causing this monster any injury – never mind accounting for its downfall – he was simply pruning the beast through his best efforts and paving the way for its exponential growth. While this theory exists as pure conjecture on my part, I do believe that this same realisation was instrumental in Ahoy’s demise, if not the sole reason for it.
And while I maintain serious reservations about the eye-witness testimony of Hedley Lawson, it nonetheless delights me – as a friend of Ahoy’s – to think that a flock of Bolivian geese should choose that very moment – the moment when the poet submerged – to bolt in unison, ten thousand strong, a mob of wingéd resolve.
Tim Spinks (Chair Of Indignant Media, Burscough Community College)
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Forfeit No.1:
Impossible Is As Impossible Does
(Deposition Before The I.O.C)
I was under orders from nike. They suggested that I don an adidas singlet and then fall behind decisively in the marathon of my choice, arms flailing, a turbine of failure taking the pulse of my parents’ late despair and pronouncing it bang on the money.
I did ask if I could come second to last instead and they told me no, not if you want to get paid. You should amount to an act of desertion – the judas of athleticism – blubbering away like the immediate next of kin.
This is why I cuckolded my fabled stamina and how my legs turned to crime.
Forfeit No.3
Tony Blair is a type of cape Canaveral. He counts down from ten, as if threatening to do more than behave like tony blair on a loop; then he blasts off like an altogether scary rationale.
The roman catholic church is his mission control. “What do you reckon?” Asks Tony, outlying the orbit that he might sequester its gyrations in prayer.
You look fantastic, the church says. Like superman in one of his films when he throws a tantrum and then retreats to the heavens, disgusted by planet earth as a whole.
This is exactly what tony blair has had in his mind from the very beginning. He dares to look back over his left hand shoulder and discovers that the West Bank has configured itself into a shortlist for Best Supporting Penitent. God’s knighthood, after everything, is waiting for him there.
CLICK HERE TO READ ALL OF NEIL ADDISON’S
Apocapulco
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Excerpted from ‘The Gangsters of Literature: A Brief Life of Frank Ahoy’ by Tim Spinks (Chair of Indignant Media, Burscough Community College), Verlag Hedley Lawson (2010)
Frank Ahoy subscribed to a theory of transmission in relation to his writing, basing this theory on an instructive dream which visited the poet at intervals and always featured the same outcome. As the disturbing repetition wound itself up, Ahoy would find himself arrested by otherworldly creatures while attempting to flee Planet Earth, having reached that active threshold where such an escape might, perchance, occur (although the routes chosen by Ahoy differed each time, his fate was, at this point, unswerving).
With these assembled beings towering over the squat poet on stork-like legs, Ahoy was asked, by way of telepathy, to give up his language to the group (with the symbolic alacrity of dreams, Frank Ahoy’s vocabulary now materialised en masse, contained inside a tartan suitcase carried in the poet’s right hand). There was no clear understanding between the parties as to what this request signified, and Ahoy could not tell whether his co-operation promised freedom, leniency, or no such thing. Was it a prerequisite for the journey ahead, a real-time adjudication, a merciful sham, or else an instance of dialectical frottage? There was no way of knowing. Either the creatures were as impassive as they appeared or else Ahoy lacked the wherewithal to detect their passions. (The faces of these aliens were saddle-shaped, off-white, and indented with sparse features). Irrespective of his confusion, or perhaps because of it, Frank gave the suitcase up without protest each time.
Immediately the creatures opened his baggage wide, but finding nothing inside to prosecute – or nourish themselves? – except day-old newspapers, they proceeded to rip these apart and place the torn strips in their weird mouths. After an age, the creatures regurgitated this substance onto the ground, stooped to consider the mess, and then began patting it into shapes with their fragile digits. It was Frank Ahoy’s strenuous need to interpret these shapes which roused him from his slumber at this point, and had the poet reaching for one of those stubby blue biros pilfered from William Hill, scattered about his night-stand, anxious to record these impossible dimensions.
It was in this fashion that the ‘Forfeit’ series of poems took on form.
Personally, I believe it was this same perceived ‘sourcing’ of the text which allowed Ahoy to approach his own work in performance as though reading it for the very first time, with assiduous bafflement, as if he had acquired the uncanny ability to disown the language at hand and label it as ‘other’ whilst exploring this same estrangement in depth. This quizzical interrogation, in its most extreme manifestations, saw the poet refusing to give voice to certain words as they appeared on the page, spluttering at the sight of them, summoning instant neologisms or else employing decisive mispronunciations instead (at such times, a tragic gaiety had the run of Ahoy’s face, operating its muscles like an inebriated puppet-master apprised that the rot had set in already, expediting the destruction of his own cherished stage).
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Tuesday and an unexpected windfall through the post in the form of a 16gb memory stick, minus any preface or instruction (the hardware is brandless on the outside and coloured British Racing Green). I deliberate over this curious arrival for the best part of an hour, but there is little for me to deduce without first plugging the stick into my wind-up laptop (bought on the the Dock Road, North of Millers Bridge Industrial Estate, and designed to meet the general needs of the Third World).
So I do crank up the machine, take all necessary steps, and the computer gestates this new connection for the best part of thirty seconds (the process sounds like a teacher – on the verge of a nervous breakdown – repeating her name backwards on a blackboard with chalk). Then, all of a sudden, numerous icons appear on the laptop’s murky screen, arranged in a pyramidal formation; and inside each of these folders, a quartet of video files.
Afterwards, days follow nights, and as they both pass me by I keep these JPEGS on shuffle for I cannot tell you how long – confronted with my greatest wish – as they induce in me a bearable trance-state.
Here is Frank Ahoy on camera, flouting his mortality, both feet shy of the grave.
A fortnight later, as I move to throw out the accompanying jiffy bag – as an act of negligible exorcism – I find a large plastic badge lodged inside, down amongst the bubble-wrap (it appears to be the creation of a Mister Maker badge making kit). The badge employs a Gotham typeface and reads as follows:
It’s Alright Ma,
It’s All Gone Mid-Career
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http://www.youtube.com/user/apocapulco
CLICK HERE TO READ ALL OF NEIL ADDISON’S
APOCAPULCO
THE RELIABLY WONDERFUL MICHAEL PARENTI: A LECTURE FROM 1999
a few key points: 9:40, 13:35, 35:00, 47:50, 50:10
“Instead of pretending at trying to eradicate poverty we should be learning to perfect it. The goal should not be ‘sustainable growth’ but sustainable poverty. Wherever poverty means starvation, humiliation and ignorance the definition of the word ‘poverty’ has gone wrong. Not being able to afford a Ferrari should not equal death: quite the opposite. Poverty should mean the time and freedom to think, play, live. Birds exist in poverty but they sing and they fly. Nature is poverty; the pursuit of the accumulation of wealth is a neurosis. As long as the wealthy print our dictionaries we will misunderstand this. We suffer the direct and indirect effects of Lucrosis.”
-Napoleon Fanon
(forget ye not to use the “cc” button, lower right on player, for the film)
i’ll be back
ADDICTION, SCHMADDICTION
I few weeks back I read the thing about “Q.R. Markham”, the feller who cobbled together a bunch of stolen spy texts and got the result published to rave reviews. At the time I assumed he was some kind of PoMod trickster with ice water for blood. It seems he isn’t… just some poor schlub who tried to get away with something and failed. You know how it goes: commit war crimes on a genocidal scale and you get a bestselling memoir published; plagiarize some spy novels and get yourself inundated with death threats.
“Q.R. Markham” turns out to be the no-less-pseudonymous-sounding “Quentin Rowan” and he’s just posted an article about his naughty escapade in some zine called THE FIX… as a sort of AA testimonial. Rowan is what’s called an “abstinent alcoholic”, apparently. One glowing irony being that it’s clear from Rowan’s article that he could’ve scribbled together a decent spy thriller on his own (and it must have taken almost as much time to make the stolen texts harmonize into a coherent book as it would have been to do a book from scratch). But what grabbed me about this little episode was the whole (crypto-Christian) “addiction” business (aka The Rehab Industry aka Detox Addiction). I left the following comment on Rowan’s article; if you’re not bamboozled by the deeply-dishonest implications of most “Self Help” psychobabble (ie: we are immortals progressing, the long hard way, toward a responsible citizenship in Heaven) you might consider the philosophical implications…
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[ed.'s note: painting by the fabtastulous Todd Schorr]
Good to see the checkered demon over in fine art.
For the GU blog on Markham I plagiarised one of the comments above me.
Unfortunately the mods binned the comment I copied and pasted making me look like some earnest indie-author.
Post -modernism is so complicated these days.
Anyway just popping in quickly before a period of work takes me away until the noo-year.
Happy whatever-whatever and look forward to more of this enjoyably intermittent slow-cooking thread in 2012.
Comrade ET! And a MERRY NEW-THANX-O-WEENMAS KWANZUKKAH to You, too!
I saw that meta-comment of yours in the GUblog Markham thread and chuckled, so it wasn’t wasted. Post-modernism is so complicated these days because nothing is not post-modern, anymore. Imagine if nothing had not been Cubist? Or if nothing had not been Gothic or Baptist? Hard to know what being a Baptist means or does when nothing is not Baptist.
Enjoy the new work and remember that pushing the boundaries of your Art shouldn’t mean lying in a fish tank with a hungry hyena… or something.
(As one of your fellow original 5,000 fans of the Checkered Demon, I have to ask you if you think his change of pants suits him or looks a little… what’s the word I want? Not “Gay”, of course. Never.)
Was a bit surprised to see the Demon wearing pants to be honest.
DASEIN
Comparative Vlad:
…when his rum-soaked, two-ton fruitcake style works and when it doesn’t…
“He learned to appreciate the singular little thrill of following dark byways
in strange towns, knowing well that he would discover nothing, save filth,
and ennui, and discarded “merry-cans” with “Billy” labels, and the jungle
jingles of exported jazz coming from syphilitic cafés. He often felt that the
famed cities, the museums, the ancient torture house and the suspended gar-
den, were but places on the map of his own madness.” (yes)
“He contemplated the pyramids of Ladorah (visited mainly
because of its name) under a full moon that silvered the sands
inlaid with pointed black shadows. He went shooting with the
British Governor of Armenia, and his niece, on Lake Van. From
a hotel balcony in Sidra his attention was drawn by the manager
to the wake of an orange sunset that turned the ripples of a
lavender sea into goldfish scales and was well worth the price
of enduring the quaintness of the small striped rooms he shared
with his secretary, young Lady Scramble.” (no)
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The second paragraph crumbles. Something off about “silvered” and “lavender”. It’s just bad poetry, isn’t it? Like using “cerulean” in a description of the sky. Even “orange”… while not being kitsch… is unnecessary. Vlad subscribed to over-description.
His great works are very often like the city of Berlin, where the grandest studies in ornate architectural elegance neighbor tacky horrors. Vlad’s work is too often encased in an aura of canonical amber, beyond reproach; critical research in Nabokov studies is usually preoccupied with riddle-chasing or tasks itself with merely explaining why everything works so beautifully. But everything doesn’t!
One plausible explanation for Lolita‘s near-perfection is the balancing “vulgarity” and banality of its subject and setting; that and its blessed brevity… the opposite of Ada in many ways. No writer is so much better than even the worst writer that she/he isn’t available to teach by negative example.
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Merry Fucking Crypto-Pagan Whatever, All Ye Friends So Lurking and Explicit!
I leave you with this (and so much for the racist cliche of Black women supposedly having gargantuan asses by genetic law, eh?):
READ HERE BEFORE THEY MAKE IT DISAPPEAR
Just struggled through “The Reader” which has some good bits at the beginning ( not the sex scenes! Though they do contain bits ) but which in its attempts to be uber-liberal/humanist ends up appearing to suggest that learning to read Chekhov can absolve the lead character ( an illiterate ex SS officer ) of her complicity in the extermination of Jews.
Or if it didn’t do that it confused the issue so much that it was impossible to tell which was worse.
The film is a classic of the “Preposterous Liberal Wet Dream Fantasy Which Does The Opposite Of What It Intends” genre. Four stars.
In any another category – No stars.
Comrade ET! Hope you enjoyed the transition into this, the Final Year of Recorded History (according to some calendars)! And I hope you have time, later, to speak of your wild Artistic adventures abroad. (Yes, and, believe it or not, when the odd hour or two tore itself free this month I managed to do good work on the video project you contributed those paintings to! I believe in the Geologic Timescale, man. Life and Art are sweeter… more Mediterranean… that way… )
Re: Ze Reader: I know what you were thinking: “Kate Winslet and her body-double’s teats [ed.'s note: no, they were inserted via Computer Graphics... see illustration]; how can I go wrong?” And yet it went so terribly wrong. Mostly because you aren’t German. The whole “good Nazi” thing doesn’t speak to you. You know, of course, that a few brass-balled Amnesiacs around here sometimes agitate to call attention to the searing matter of German suffering during (and immediately after) WW2!
I had an idea for a film script, called “Getting Away With It”, in which a Nazi doctor type, named, oh, Hubertus Strughold, gets up to all kinds of very naughty pseudo-medical nastiness in the name of “research” during the war, then wins a first class ticket to the US when the party’s over, starts working for the Yanks, ends up getting a street in Texas named after him! A Cinderella Story. Still waiting for all of Hubertus’ next of kin, former colleagues and close friends to die off before I start on it. Obviously.
Whilst I’m not German ( although I was conceived of in Germany. Bored mother having affair with soldier whilst her husband rounded up der Winsletts ) I am prepared to give most ideas a hearing if the art is good and the arguments are strong. In response to your Lolita comment upstream I’d say the strength of the book is not only in its prose but the fact that he puts you in an awkward position of being the confidant of Humbert and if he doesn’t exactly win your sympathy he gives you an insight into the delights and torture of sustaining a paedophile’s lifestyle. Somewhere you’d normally not want to be in a million years.
The arguments in the Reader weren’t good however. The makers seemed more concerned with the humanising, redemptive qualities of reading quality lit. Ralph Fiennes was in it too. Doesn’t he remember the films he’s been in [ed.'s note: well he did play an historical personage, who had a dubious relationship with Fascism, in The English Patient]? In Schindler’s List he gave a quality demonstration of how you can listen to classical music whilst slaughtering Jews at the same time. But here he was another weepy-eyed do-gooder trying to save e by reading her books.
“( although I was conceived of in Germany. Bored mother having affair with soldier whilst her husband rounded up der Winsletts )”
Well done, ET, you do NOT look your age! Pilates? Tantric (aka Sting-ish) Yoga? What’s the secret(ion)?
Re: Lolitha (sic): perceptive comment but I was always “pulling for” (har) Quilty. Ever see the absolutely horrid film Sue Lyon ended up in after the highpoint of Kubrick’s Lolita? So bad it’s… very, very bad:
I’m a mere 55 SA but the Winslett herding went on for years due to the skill in which they dug themselves immediately into the new administration.
To return to The Reader what was odd was that the film never once shone a light on all the older people who had assumed power and asked “What did you do?” Bruno Ganz was one of those people in the film. Had they never watched “Downfall”?
His books can be awfully mawkish but occasionally Heinrich Boll makes some very acute observations about the “smoothness” of the changeover in post-war Germany.
People sometimes wonder, over brunch or in editorials, ET, why the Policia aren’t a little harder on the Nuevo Nazties (I’m writing in code now, in case you’re wondering) over here and I often think, in response, that the answer to that one is rather staring us (or me) in the face. Whatever I mean by that.
‘Suspicions’ about Pablo Neruda’s death but none about John Lennon’s! Classic.
Since no nation, understandably, seems willing to confront the ugly matter of its own legacy of Key Conspiracies, may I suggest that the various nations swap assorted investigations? Ie, America can work on exposing Putin’s skullduggery (eg Smolensk), Russia can expose 9/11 and/or the JFK event, Ireland can unearth the facts about Fukushima, Japanese researchers can expose the agenda behind the recent False Flag in Norway… and so on…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/10043972
1,000 PAGES of FICTION ET AL
DOWNLOAD TET PAC
BE THE FIRST IN YOUR KINGDOM TO OWN ‘EM ALL
Holy shit, d00d…it took literally 5 fucking minutes for this page to load on my superfast 11 Mbps connection; for people with short attention spans, that’s like several fun-filled lifetimes. Did I say 5 minutes? The fucking page is still loading, grinding away in the background, 8 goddamn minutes after I got here. You have to re-tool, man. Aside from that, happy final year of life on earth. Mother of God…this page is STILL loading. This is insanity. I expect it’ll take all night to post this brief greeting. Well, I’ll just pop over to another browser tab and leave it to resolve itself.
Sir M! Yeah, I know… I really should start a new thread. It’s just that things are still so frazzly-hectic over here in the Faddaland and… erm… I’m a lazy bastid and… erm…
But I’ve been reading Pol Hom with great pleasure/interest; the thing about Achmed Abdullah was fascinating. Never heard of him. Yer a vital source of wondrous arcana, man! I like the new well-’ard avatar, too.
[but those loading hang-ups seem to be intermittent; the thread just loaded for me in under a minute. I suspect weird links...]
Otherwise known as my passport photo. Looking like a thug has its advantages. I can’t remember the last time some strutting cock-of-the-walk gave me a hard time: they tend to look for easier meat. Yeah, that Achmed Abdullah got me too; I’d never heard of him but what an interesting life. Hope all’s copacetic with you and yours. Gotta roll…your thread’s crashing my browser.
My computer has usually been proved to be the most primitive of those posting here and on PH but TET downloads very quickly both on the work computer and the laptop.
Keep this thread going I say. I like the sense of history.
My (benevolently) tragic lack of time plus mind-bogglingly inert inertia will conspire to keep you happy on that one, ET! It’s been so long since I started a new thread that I seem to’ve misplaced the StarFleet manual on the proper protocols… (where are the fooking dilithium crystals…?)
[ed.'s note: but we are sincerely worried that Mishari is still scraping goop out of his mainframe since his last encounter with tarry TET]
GREATEST HITS pt 2
If you have the patience to sit through this entire video, it will astonish you
THEATER FANTASTIQUE, BABY: POP SOME CORN and FLOAT THROUGH HERR HESSE’S LIBIDO
They are repeating The Singing Detective on BBC4 tonight. It might be on an iplayer facility of some sort. Less breaks than YouTube for those with some semblance of an attention span left – I do have one but January, for me is the cruellest month.
I haven’t seen it since it was first shown and will make the effort.
I can still vividly remember scene after scene of it ( not merely Patrick Malahide’s pumping buttocks in the woods ) or think I can. My memory may well be playing tricks. We shall see.
I suspect Blackeyes would be worth a second look as well. It got drowned out by “Dirty Den” headlines and puritan attitudes first time round but given all the recent hacking scandals its themes of media controlled images might well be extremely prescient.
The Singing Detective (original, of course): what a monsterpiece, ET! Gambon + Potter = A Glimpse of What Television Could Have Fucking Been (the image that stuck with me was the psoriasis, which made our protagonist resemble a glazed doughnut)
(Black Eyes missed me… probably because it couldn’t make it past Uncle Sam’s tit-filter the first time around, when TV and I still had a relationship)
(PS I always found July much crueler than either January or April, though… probably the stench, noise and revealed red flesh of the mcnugget-fed masses)
Just watched the first episode of TSD and 25 years on it still shines out.
To my relief the images and scenes I thought I remembered I did actually remember. Quite accurately as well which surprised me. I would have been equally as pleased if I had made up images of that quality too.
The boy in the tree-tops is a particularly vivid image for me.
Gambon’s litany of thoughts to try and stop himself getting an erection whilst Joanne Whalley greases him up was especially good ending with “The Guardian woman’s page ” .
Funny, ET, I just caught myself using an image from The Guardian to prevent an erection being caused by reading “getting an erection whilst Joanne Whalley greases him up”… and I beshat myself laughing, instead. Worth it…?
By the beard of Zeus!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I sincerely hope that most of your sex life isn’t at the beck and call of post-modernism though obviously it would be far more entertaining for the casual reader if it was.
ET, I do believe you’ve come up with a comment it is nigh unto impossible to forge a quip at!
Lee Rourke, please note: not one mention of such literary qualities as penmanship or bookshelf-design in the following…
GREATEST UNSUNG SHORTS, #56, 72 & 89:
“CALAMUS” and “CONFIDENCE” and “SYLVIE”
CALAMUS
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CONFIDENCE
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Sylvie: A Nanonovel in 6 Chaptagraphs
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all photos re-re-stolen from here, probably