Roulette Wheel of Shame

Now that I am overcome with shame, the feeling is akin to losing one’s grip and falling. In their embarrassment the shy person folds their arms and hangs their head. They can feel the ground collapsing under their feet and are trying hard not to fall. They had been clinging to the group and believed they were a branch of the social tree, and, all of a sudden, it is as though they no longer have anything to hold on to. We could turn this around and assert that physical disgust, moral disdain and social indignation are all ways of unifying the group, which becomes of its own accord the repository of the majority view. 

- Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Shame

Bigger Than Life (Nicholas Ray, 1956)

Cluny Brown (Ernst Lubitsch, 1946)

Were you to have some time on your hands and were you to therefore ask me what I think shame is, I would try to underscore its polar nature and I would say that shame is when people, places, and/or things make you feel worthless and defective. I got into the habit of being called worthless and sometime after that I graduated to actually being and believing I was worthless. I’m very much in alignment here with philosopher Frédéric Gros, then, as he sees the purified and untainted voice of shame itself in the simple but always hurtful utterance: shame on you. I also once heard a wise man say that the healthy part of shame, the part that can be metabolized and utilized, is the part that prevents one from spiralling off into shamelessness and grotesque entitlement. If you say shame on you to me today, I confront you with my eyes until you flinch. The shame isn’t on us. It moves around like some kind of specialized counterfeit money.

The final statement on the increasingly apocalyptic discrepancy between good ol’ right-sizing shame and bombastic bomb-the-Technicolor-torpedos spree-happy shamelessness is Nicholas Ray’s outrageously subversive but just-syrupy-enough 1956 masterpiece Bigger Than Life, with James Mason as Ed Avery, a school teacher with a secret part-time cab driver hustle on the side whose system is pumping way too much cortisol and whose finances are likewise stressed, all the lovely things and places of the ‘50s commercial universe and not a dime left to pay for any of it, and thus when the doctors put him on a corticosteroid to treat inflammation of the arteries, he goes full psychotic and outrageously performative…and I guess we shouldn’t really be surprised. At the climax of the meek professor’s self-aggrandizing psychosis, he goes upstairs to kill his son and tells his wife he’s like Abraham setting about to go sacrifice Isaac. She reminds him that God ultimately spared Isaac, and at this moment, pinnacle of 1950s cinema to many connoisseurs, James Mason loudly declaims “God was wrong!” in a manner that perfectly combines the stentorian self-seriousness of a politician and the distressed confoundedness of a child. It is the child who when told shame on you cannot really understand, even if the neural wiring of that child on some level nevertheless does.

Telling the story of a year in the life of Leo Feldman, imprisoned in a state institution as a result of having run a shady below-board black-market-type operation out of the basement of his department store—or maybe he’s just bad—Stanley Elkin’s early novel A Bad Man is all about the allocation and placement of shame in a way that mirrors the representation of guilt and institutional absurdity in Kafka’s The Trial. Whereas Kafka leans into ascetic dry humour and the origins of his form and style in parable, Elkin is all vaudeville and post-bop jazz. Assessing himself and his life, Feldman, the no-questions-asked business operator, fundamentally grey market in makeup, reflects upon himself and his life up to arrest: “everyone had already been tempted, that everyone had already succumbed, had had those things happen to him which he wanted to have happen, and was looking for them to happen again. Seduction was routine; yielding was; everyone had a yes to spend and spent it.” The free market would like to encourage just enough shamelessness such that each yes becomes good and lubricated. Those of us who find ourselves in a bipolar mania are want to throw currency around like tinsel. For a very long time the advertisers have been working on disinhibiting our behavioural patterns.

Through some purely organic though also perfectly worlded process, your epigenetic program is imprinted within you from the beginning and the genes fire and misfire, or adapt or evolve, as you engage your world from the embodied standpoint of materiality, sequence, and cognizance. You will internalize all the signs presented to you and some of them will be seedlings, good and bad. You oughtn’t remain cavalier out here for long. Remain morally and ethically resolute…right when you need to most especially. It has to be a rigid and loose program, and therefore a flexible/foldable one. “Why is the line of flight a war one risks coming back from defeated, destroyed,” pose Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “after having destroyed everything one could?” I love how at the end of Ernst Lubitsch’s Cluny Brown, the greatest ever comedy about the line of flight, Cluny (Jennifer Jones), having attained her line of flight and crossed a whole ocean, faints, presumably having also in a fairly short time window gotten herself pregnant by Charles Boyer’s continental Lothario. It is the job of comedy since Shakespeare to produce a number of saleable couples by the end of the final act, but the especially epic and heroic couple breaks free, negotiates with the geography, and transplants itself to where it can have the right kind of light (even at night). For those who have been shamed out of existence, the answer can only ever be persistence…

Trotsky

 

Enthusiasm (Dziga Vertov, 1931)

I know a guy named Curtis who drives a Ford truck and does demolition work on home renovations. I think of Curtis as a bit of a bro. And yet here we are at a prized local burger joint eating burgers, drinking pilsners, and doing our best to ogle the comely wait staff with the bare minimum of decency and decorum…all of a sudden Curtis looks right at me and says: “the preeminent and basic economics of romantic love is one of talk…not just bodies and their endless possibilities…meaningful communication in furtherance of heightened and more intense connection.” I looked at him a brief spell and saw for sure that he meant it. For some reason most definitely Curtis-related I went straight home and wrote in my notebook: beware of the sarcastic girls. It seemed funny last night but now it does not. Do people somehow manage to talk for more than fifteen or twenty minutes? Is most of the talk necessarily mean to somebody or can the branch extend?

Back when I lived in Vancouver, the days of narcotics and tree-planting, I was also in a garage rock band called the Fudds. We were all dopers and hedonistic womanizers and, ultimately, sad fucking burnouts, the lot of us. I moved back to Calgary fifteen years ago and kicked the hard stuff, with one or two nasal deviations…over fifteen years. Suddenly Feldman, who played lead guitar, messages me out of the blue and says he’ll be pulling through Calgary on the long trek from Nanaimo to Gatineau, Québec. I know that he has a wife and kid so I am able to deduce that his situation can’t be all that good. Upon arrival at my home, Feldman says he’d like to walk a bit and stretch his legs—walk and talk—so we head down in the direction of Lindsay Park and he starts to lay it out: Dagger Deacon, A.K.A Chad, former vocalist of the Fudds, is missing and a twenty-five-year-old woman was found in his apartment, dead from a fentanyl overdose. Additionally, Feldman had been sleeping with this young woman, presently deceased, and a few others in her seedy orbit; everybody he knows now knows, and that very definitely includes his wife. I’m not really drinking these days, but Feldman and I went and got good and plastered at an Irish pub in Mission and walked home yelling at the unusually ominous sky. When your rage is God-sized that’s when you really, really need God. Feldman had departed before I rose. I was in utterly pitiful shape.

I wrote a play when I was sixteen. It was about a dashing young skater boy who is universally reviled by his peers for being weird and incomprehensibly verbose and who believes himself the reincarnation of Leon Trotsky, whose name he appropriates for all sorts of nefarious purposes—his various motiveless crimes. In the first scene he goes berserk and beats another kid badly with the remnants of the skateboard the other kid has just come close to breaking over his knee, all of this to the loud applause of the other children in attendance. After this our hero embarks on a series of breakings and enterings that have no real point to them; he never steals anything, he just stalks people and walks around their houses, often while they are still in them. He recalls these events to strangers, sex workers, and three different psychiatrists. At the end he gives some random goofy-looking kid his own skateboard and says: “Tell them you got it from Leon Trotsky, kid.” I could probably still do something with some of that material. Ain’t nobody ‘round these parts gonna stage no play by the likes of heathen me, hem hem, but I bet I could make a nifty little ‘zine or something… 

Two Drawings | Holding it Together and Falling Apart

“I have the feeling that something’s—sort of cracking in me.”

- Patricia Highsmith, Edith’s Diary

…don’t know what Prof. Pranump would make of that, especially since she’s teetotal, tea, Triscuits, Ritz crackers, Saltines, Fritos, Doritos, Frito-Lay, Planters peanuts, Blue Diamond smoked almonds, Prohibition, Some Like it Hot, the fact that soon polar bears and walruses will have nowhere to go, because the polar ice is melting, cheese and pineapple on sticks, cheddar cheese logs, school bus, ground cardamon, dried cherries, zest, the fact that walruses can swim for four hundred miles, sure, but not forever, for Pete’s sake…

- Lucy Ellmann, Duck’s, Newburyport 

Earth Crasher

Neural Gating

 

The Cinderella EP Lyric Sheet

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Double Country Bonus Bundle Lyric Sheet

I Don't Know About You

Demonlover (Olivier Assayas, 2002)

With dispensation from upper management I achieved orgasm on an interplanetary Zeppelin. I don’t know about, I don’t know about, I don’t know about you. Crashed through the ceiling in something revealing with tingling in the earring and a dearth of proper learning as I’d been too busy scrubbing Ethel Merman and abjuring. I don’t know about, I don’t know about, I don’t know about you. A girl’s got to keep her skin real right and that’s why we only go out for dumplings at night. I don’t know about, I don’t know about, I don’t know about you. She took the Chevy to the levy and I’m afraid she gone and rolled it, crawled out from under, dusted herself off, and bolted. I don’t know about, I don’t know about, I don’t know about you. When you see them coming and you ain’t busy doing something, jump off that crate of Pabst Blue Ribbon and wipe off the spot where you been dribbling; there’s an army of kooks with semiautomatics saying they want to impound the station wagon and flagellate the missus, doing a fancy jig so that court summons can’t hit us. I don’t know about you. Since when does a computer wear tennis shoes? I don’t know about you. The soggy onion ring looks like you when you’ve had a few and wake up lost in New Orleans at 4:30 in the morning, lizard people swarming. I don’t know about you. Down at the stud farm they believe themselves conscientious, but they’ll pound your ass sideways at any sign of wetness, dagnabit, and cast a spell so you immediately forget it. How can I persuade you, he who misplayed you, cut himself shaving and  affixed a small piece of tissue, that if the President of the Union of Situationships can't bend over backward for his friends from the syndicates, I’m-a smoke a blunt in his hiding place and wait to see the motherfuckin look on his face. I don’t know about, I don’t know about, I don’t know about you.

Cowboy, Hellfire

The Doom Generation (Gregg Araki, 1995)

Prepared to meet my maker I advanced upon the horde, I swung my sword and screamed and roared, from the heavens I heard a low, rumbling chord. The gates of hell opened up beneath, I tumbled in holding my testicles in my teeth and laid all out like a Christmas wreath. I guess that I was the most recent thief, all they gave me for ornament was this paltry leaf. I swear, I swear, it were not as though I were unaware, prancing around with my testicles hanging down, I just don’t care, round after round, a resounding sound. You are a loser. You have no control over yourself. How do you expect to take control of the room if you need to sometime soon? Jesus Hellfire Club Christ, the nine pound dildo that killed John Henry ain’t gonna kill me, Lord, ain’t gonna kill me. What do you mean accessory to the crime? I was out back having a pee. It’s my birthday, you fat fuck. Duck and cover, Moscow’s here, catch chlamydia by its ear, if the Irish don’t chase you out...you’ll earn yourself a bit of deadly clout. From the weaponized perspective of the local anesthetic everyone’s a proper dummy with big globs of cotton filling up their tummy, maybe they say ‘hi there’ and maybe they Shazam, maybe I get a read on what’s going on on the The Infotainment Scan. Your mamma raised a better girl than straightforward vanilla sex. To love a cowboy proper you say happy trails to all the rest.

Clara-fication

 

MemoratorXXV

The Red Badge of Courage (John Huston, 1951)

Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975)

When at age thirteen or thereabouts I started getting excited about the wide world of motion pictures I also of course grew resourceful when it came to seeing art movies, world cinema, and off-the-beaten-track fare; seeing stuff and finding out bits and pieces about what had been going on since the late 19th century, movies and fucked-up movie people, from Helsinki to Rotterdam, a lot of it sounding like a whole hell of a lot of fun had indeed gone on...scandals that would cause the jaws of entrenched royal dynasties to fall to the floors and clank. Dignified achievements also. The first international art cinema titans who grabbed me and got me steaming with excitement hot off the bat were Federico Fellini, especially 8½ (1963) and Roma (1972), and Ingmar Bergman, especially Through a Glass Darkly (1961) and Persona (1966). When it came to significant American directors whose films I could rent, watch on TV, or see in a cinema, my predilection was for directors or films who/which demonstrated a distinctive visual approach moment-to-moment that could not be mistaken and that clearly artistically insisted upon itself. 

Living Austro-Hungarian cartoon turtle Billy Wilder spoke to me precisely because I believe the critics are right when they claim that his work is cruel, predatory, and controlled. Peter Bogdanovich can barely handle to hear Billy Wilder’s name. Precisely what I ordered, then, doc—lights, camera, medicine cabinets. As a teen I most liked Double Indemnity (1944) and Sunset Boulevard (1950), surely their being the two most darkly lit in all the filmography. 

Not yet aware of who his super famous dad was or what all that entailed, and many years short of reading Picture, Lillian Ross’s book about that film’s incomprehensibly absurd production, ritual studio butchering, and disownment by near all associated, I remember being deeply touched by the meditative monumentalism and mindful pathfinding in John Huston’s The Red Badge of Courage (1951) when I watched it on TV, an unusual blip in the programming. Because I’d just seen it on video, I could not help but place Huston’s approach in counterpoint with what I’d seen in and absorbed from Stanley Kubrick’s 1957 war tribunal flick Paths of Glory. 

I was fascinated and more than a bit jazzed also by John Frankenheimer because in The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Seconds (1966) he shoots closeups and people in group formations in a way that is instantly recognizable and totally unlike anybody else’s shit. His use of lenses can have a wonderful power to disturb and his mode is one of persistent disequilibrium, which his very specific style brings over as an ongoing flow of purely cinematic affections. Of the immediately subsequent generation of big deal American directors, it is probably Brian De Palma who most distinctly retains the encoded and encrypted Frankenheimer legacy cipher subdural implant. 

While certain filmmakers and films presented me with stuff that fertilized within me fast or hit me very hard—the experience of first seeing Jean-Luc Godard by way of Prénom Carmen (1983) and being mystified by the fact that for long stretches the soundtrack is intentionally asynchronous with the images surely deserves special evocation—the one time for absolute certain I remember being still very young and having that almost cliché reaction where the tape you are watching ends and the experience has been so powerful for you that you just sit for a considerable period silent and all but motionless....to risk sounding like I’m poor Pauline Kael losing it at the movies all over again...for me it was Robert Altman’s epic 1975 Bicentennial head-fuck Nashville. It is my strong suspicion—and there is a long, juicy history of commentary—that quite a lot of viewers react very strongly to the assassination and eerie denuded stasis that close that very-unpopular-in-Nashville true blue masterpiece of World Cinema Confederated and Entire. In terms of how my literary mind has always worked, Nashville is obviously going to appeal to me because it is a systems or network narrative plotted out over an expansive urban topography with a whole lot of characters intersecting with myriad social institutions and sowing just the right amount of that sweet straight-from-the-gourd discord wherever they may sashay. In Nashville a traffic pile-up on the freeway is a complexitive event closer to what it would be for emergency responders than to some traditional story about a person stalled in traffic and unable to meet their fiancé on time, or what have you. The essentially random shooting of Ronee Blakley’s mentally ill country singer Barbara Jean is both random and impossible to fathom from the perspective of the ground, of the earth. But it is singular and ineffaceable for anybody who has seen the film and who basically trusts their eyes and ears. In the network or systems narrative the random event loses its randomness and is placed back on the surface of the earth in highly intelligent grids and virtual blocks. For me the properly moral implications of Altman’s film and its fatalist ending are that we are each on some level culpable for the nasty little tragedies it takes all of us somehow to produce. Surely, ol’ Hitchcock would give the admiring, throat-clearing salute. Deep down, for Hitch, benevolent sadist uncle and understated humorist, personal but nonetheless too-public culpability was the One Big Game in Town.