Galileo's Nose

 

Galileo’s heliocentric discoveries were put before a jury of Galileo’s peers. That’s not a promising beginning and it didn’t go well from there; he was forced to recant before the Inquisition, but his sentence of life imprisonment was commuted to house arrest, which is just the sort of punishment me and Galileo like best. The ultimate consequence of Galileo's failure, in Brecht's view, was the development of the atomic bomb centuries later, and a still-looming “universal cry of horror.”

At the end of Brecht’s Life of Galileo, our hero is defiant and productive under house arrest, getting lots of work done and smuggling out the best. Just like the house-arrested Iranian film director Jafar Panahi who just won the Palme d’Or this past May (same month I moved into my house). I was in the same room as Mohsen Makhmalbaf that one time I went to Cannes and I sat there hands folded and beaming like some mesmerized super geek. Iranian cinema for life! Persian poetics in perpetuity!

Parents

 

Myself and My Mother

My Father and I

In his savvy, savage, quick-like-a-bunny play Endgame, Samuel Beckett reserves as the worst slurs and pejoratives words connected to human reproduction qua reproduction. The characters Nagg and Nell are contemptuously accused of being "accursed progenitors." Though Beckett relied on his mother well into his adulthood as I have, I see things quite a bit differently than he, and I think that is largely contingent on the fact that I was set up with about as good a pair of parents as a guy like me could ask for, sharing their genes, naturally. Did we quarrel? Just the right amount. My mother has stood with me through trials and tribulations nobody else could have handled to watch from even a comfortable distance, screaming-squealing torrents of dissipation and wreckage; it's partly her nursing background and partly just the stuff of which she's made. My father is one of the most charming, warm, and genuinely attentive people I have ever met. I interfaced with a whole lot of men and women when I was young who told me how much they liked working for my dad. These days, I seem to always feel much better after a little time with him.

   

Ten Perfect Rock Songs

 

Versus, "Crazy-Maker"

Lambchop, "Gone Tomorrow"

Neil Young and Crazy Horse, "Shots"

Royal Trux, "The Banana Question"

Rufus Thomas, "The Dog"

Aldous Harding, "The Barrel" 

The Primrods, "All Right Tokyo!"

Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, "Plastic Factory"

The Fall, "Dr. Bucks's Letter"

Creedence Clearwater Revival, "Keep On Chooglin'"

Five New Drawings with Brief Introduction

The Author as Psychedelic Leather Daddy

As my ever-attentive and heavily taxed mother walked me to school on my first day of first grade, I clung to and pulled at her desperately, pleading not to be made to go and face my inevitable shame, sure she’d have to come pick me up in a few hours after they’d flunked me out of school and society for good. For the most part, I would argue that my anger is well-bound-together and even at times crystalline, but when I start to get flummoxed and the cortisol starts overloading the entire central nervous system, I can be hostile and quite frightening in my extrajudicial outreach and ghastly pinwheel hyperactivity. It would not surprise me if I died in some unimaginably stupid way on account of an intense outburst of momentary road rage. Sometimes when I scream an obscenity aloud thinking I’m alone and realize someone else is in hearing distance, the wretchedness and pitifulness that befall me are like a kind of marvel. I think a lot about what happens when the flight instinct is turned on full blast for days and days and there’s simply nowhere to go and no damned end to it. Kierkegaard’s ‘sickness unto death,’ a sickness of the self in relating to itself, is precisely the living impasse of self-relating (which is mimetic of the basic condition of the addict). First we are alienated by basic epistemology and then we are alienated by our swinish fellows, digging in the shit in hopes of catching a quick tip. Your lack of emotional intelligence suits you. There’s no other way to access the trading floor. When I did a workshop with a pair of married gurus back in 2009, I was told that there is a massive amount of terror hiding in the base of my spine and that this terror is in my case unusually accessible. I can go from zero to full terror in fractions of a second. That’s where I was as my mother walked me to school that first day, commencement of years of trials and abuses concerning which no small boy could ever be expected to imagine any unthinkable particular: a nine or ten on the terror scale. Here again my strong intuitions prove all but perfectly sound. Grade school was a wasteland like Eliot’s:

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not

Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,

Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

The fluorescent lights at school gave me horrible migraines all the time. I seemed always to have contact dermatitis, eczema, and/or a mouthful of canker sores. My hockey padding and uniform were hard on my skin and sometimes playing was agonizing and very itchy. I knew the kids with whom I was growing up were going to devolve the world a good deal more than it already had been, possibly beyond recourse now anyway, and that this was terrifying and very unsettling. My body was rejecting the whole agonizing theatre of operations, entering into maladaptive patterns, looking for asymmetric ways to engage stronger adversaries. I wanted to talk to whoever was in charge of everything, not that I expected for a moment that such an entity would be able to comfort me or offer assurances of any kind. Filmmaker and alcoholic John Huston said that God is drunk. Surely Huston eventually figured out, either on this shore or the other: drunk is far too gentle a word for it. That surveilling eye in the sky? He’d apparently happily watch us all die, the more gruesome and protracted the better. I bet God is a fat sadistic fuck eating popcorn. The more optimistic undercurrent in this new batch of drawings hints I think maybe at the possibility that all kinds of people who like all sorts of puzzles will help put space-time back together again.

Walter Brennan Tripping on Acid at Christmastime 

I Love Chlöe Parks

At the Best Western Jacuzzi Suite

Cock, Balls, and Music Halls

Goddamn Fucking Pigeons

Three Faces

 Your future is all used up. Why don’t you go home?
- Marlene Dietrich in Touch of Evil

Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958)

When Orson Welles directed his old friend Marlene Dietrich in a small but absolutely crucial character turn in 1958’s Touch of Evil, she was fifty-seven and he was forty-three, wearing extra padding to add to his not insubstantial girth and very obviously not in the best of shape (my goodness did that man love to eat and drink). If you watch the complicated display of discrete emotions on Dietrich’s famously close-up-friendly face, you see for sure that the actress is having the same feelings as her character and that somebody—well, Mr. Welles, her old friend and current director—gets to sit and take it while with hurt in her eyes Marlene berates him for getting stupid and fat gobbling up candy bars. Sometimes we can only be mute with stupefaction when we encounter somebody who once seemed as low as low gets but who over a couple more decades would seem somehow to have reached lower depths yet. Marlene adopts the sombre and clearly pitying disgust from her own nature and reflexes. It’s real emotion and had to be by design, at least if you take design’s word for it. I wonder if Welles considered the possibility that Dietrich might break into tears and/or flee the set.   

La truite (Joseph Losey, 1982)

If there is a magic and metaphysics to the art and technology of cinema it very much pivots in large part on the human face and on close-ups, which have long drawn us like moths to porch light, a ubiquitous part of the basic grammar of narrative cinema since the early 20th century. For French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who wrote two absolutely mandatory books on the cinema, the face rendered cinematographic is a kind of psychedelic Renaissance because it requires new landscapes in and languages for looking, as well as new topologies or landscapes with respect to the human face from the standpoint of audition or mediated network interaction. “When it looks at you,” observes Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek, “Isabelle Huppert’s face destroys its own contradiction, which it had incarnated until that moment. Positive and negative in one. The film no longer needs to be developed.” This social interplay malarkey is largely electronic activity down to the sub-molecular level and all kinds of machines are activating and decommissioning us all day long, every day, remedial parasites the cost of doing business on the grid. Sometimes a lovely friend who hasn’t seen you for a good spell will upon catching sight of you ‘click on’ like an old-timey automaton. Nothing is more adorable. Certain gazes turned on you at just the right moment can make you nearly evacuate your bowels. (For intense spontaneous diarrhea brought on by moral terror, all are advised to consult Michael Tolkin’s brilliant and real fuckin ugly 1993 novel Among the Dead.) 

Jane B. par Agnès V. (Agnès Varda, 1988)

Reaching middle age, I was struck I recall by a pretty famous David Bowie quote in which the debonaire genius attempts to console us with the fact that as we grow older we become more who we were always meant to be. I thought that this certainly appeared to be true of the mercurial Mr. Bowie…and also definitely for sure Jane Birkin, who I adore most of all for her work as an actress and public personality. I had for some while been modelling my ideal rapidly forthcoming middle age after Birkin, having taken solace in and vital creative support from pictures she appeared in from about 1985 to about 1995, especially the stuff with Jacques Rivets, Jean-Luc Godard, and Agnès Varda. What is it this middle aged person has going on that a middle aged person ought to have going on? Well, Jane is no longer likely to be tricked out of being herself or themself or what-have-you, she cannot see the limits of her knowing as anything other than luxuriance and possibility, endlessly re-vitalizing. Steadfastly vulnerable, operationally agnostic. The maturity and resilience demonstrated by Jane Birkin in Jacques Rivette’s artist/model picture La belle noiseuse as her painter husband Michel Piccoli begins to get more and more inextricably bound up with Emmanuelle Béart’s model, who happens to be the most fantastically proportioned woman in at least Europe and not wearing clothes often, shows forbearance and strength like that I hope to myself some day earn, may I so happen to slay the right dragons and in the right sequence. Birkin’s Liz is the only character in Rivette’s film who sees that she needs to grow and adapt and who thereafter sets about getting to work on doing that. Birkin’s conflicted and complex gender identity led to her becoming an early advocate for queer youth and included among the special features on the Kino Lorber Blu-ray for Je t’aime moi non plus, a wonderful film from ’76 directed by her husband Serge Gainsbourg, is an interview with Jane and her co-star, Warhol company stud Joe Dallesandro, in which the lead actress, visibly emotional, says she believes that the most important thing she ever did on camera is the scene in that film where she says she really feels like a boy. Not knowing much about how other folks feel nor taking any questions at this time, I can confess that I always found Jane Birkin’s intergendered, non-binary, exploratory/playful relationship with the transience of self and the flexibility of sexuality to be noble and encouraging. That’s why I became a disciple in the first place. Also, I knew in the early years I had to be a boy and I ran with it, even though I knew I was a boy and a girl, the impetus of puberty kicking in with its rude hormonal signals and 24/7 meltdown. But you know what? I’m both agnostic and queer: I don’t have enough information about sexuality yet!    

Creature Feature: Son of Vincent van Gogh

The Insect Woman (Shōhei Imamura, 1963)

Van Gogh (Murice Pialat, 1991)

If there is to be some legacy or mythos attached to me here or hereafter, I feel it’s in everybody’s interest that we draw a basic connection between whatever is was Vincent van Gogh was and whatever it is I am, where or when or how I am yet to be established. How we are linked has much less to do with popular success having come too late and more to do instead with our particular intermeshing of bipolar-type disorder with psychotic features, substance dependency issues, artistic/creative compulsion/delirium (schizoaffective), and general tendency toward the solitary life. As mine has regularly said of me, Van Gogh’s mother worried that her son, based on his behaviour within the first two monumentally crucial years of life was going to have lots of accidents henceforth and persistently make things much more difficult than they would normally have to be, under ordinary circumstances. It is also true of Van Gogh and myself that we prize the spiritual/monastic life very highly, but we gravitate to the lower depths of the social order, for better and for worse, no bones abut it. This is actually the position of the great Japanese filmmaker Shōhei Imamura who had the stones in the ‘60s to say he was interested above all in the lower parts of the society and the lower parts of the body. The bad psychic tumult and high-minded pursuit naturally make guys like me and Van Gogh a bit like characters out of a Dostoevsky story. A nice happenstance of history: Marx and Dostoevsky were inventing modern alienation at the same time, as contemporaries. (Notes from Underground was published in 1864 and Das Kapital in 1867.) Alfred Hitchcock once said that he cast Cary Grant as the version of himself he wanted to believe in and Jimmy Stewart as the version of himself he actually was. In this light, off on a frolic of our own, might we not perhaps argue that Jacques Dutronc in Maurice’s Pialat’s Van Gogh from 1991 is the painter we wish Van Gogh was and Tim Roth in Robert Altman’s Vincent & Theo from the year previous is the seething, unkempt, and altogether foul Vincent who it isn’t hard to imagine perfectly real and the whole unpleasant deal. That being said, if Vincent & Theo is a fine picture indeed, Pialat’s film, with its transcendent and sublime turn from the rock star Dutronc, is a masterpiece for the ages, one of the greatest films of any I know about art and compulsive art-making. In going to bat ardently for Pialat’s Van Gogh, do I not implicitly fall into accord with that ever-sage advise from Maestro John Ford? When in doubt, print the legend. George Bataille calls Van Gogh “an overwhelming incarnation of the candelabrum of sunflowers,” and then goes on to picture the legendary painter “attaching to his hat a crown of lighted candles and going out under this halo at night at Arles […]. The very fragility of this miraculous hat of flames without a doubt stresses the striving for dislocation that Van Gogh obeyed each time he came under the influence of a fiery focal point.”  

Autoporpoise

The story of my blessed and madcap life: it did not look right at all but I went in anyway out of pure foolhardy willfulness and it was much worse than I expected. Spin that disk ad infinitum and chew on your broadsword the while. Memory itself is a disk system that switches disks in and out rapidly as per the immediate needs of the sentient creature negotiating the earth’s surface (custom, habit, innovation). You could not possibly carry every single memory you have at all times in a sack of any size let alone one you would be able to manage over the ever-cruel distances. Girl, you’d break your damn spine. Memory and imagination may sometimes combine in order to all the more confound. Look for the light and the colour in your consciousness and know that the positive polar angle reaches skyward and the negative polar angle crash-lands in the mud and the worms. Is that the Garden of Eden right there in the largest park in walking distance from where you yourself are located this very moment? The psychotic is the person, in this case myself, who would encourage you to pursue the idea to all its logical extremities. My father was a hard-drinking business man and often he and his buddies, half in the bag, would tell longwinded off-colour jokes and hee and haw and carry on, all of which was pure delight to me as a boy, but more importantly it was these men and certain high-grade standup comedians who demonstrated for me that if you have a brilliant zinger of a punch-line this is actually the ideal time to do a long shaggy-dog build-up, taking the audience on a circuitous journey to the outermost regions only to finally deliver that boffo punchline (everybody always howls). Every time I look back over my best work, I think: holy fuck, how did you do that? you were a fucking mess slapped over the face of a disaster! I became a Buster Keaton or Evel Knieval of this woebegone Canadian prairie, my fingers deep in archaic string instrument tunings, and the rule of thumb for pratfalls and stunts and suchlike is that you need to be good and gassed on strong spirits to deal with the pain…and everything is pain. I lived for a few years with a woman who basically shared my often esoteric taste in music, movies, and literary fiction…it spoiled me for life. Behold me in my spats, emboldened before God’s gnashing snatch. I am God’s monkey wrench…have you ever begun to consider how many different things you might be able to do with a monkey wrench? You know, like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. Form is the inhuman and God-like dimension of art and it’s what us perfectionists are trying to get a free and clean high off of. Again, the really interesting idea in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness is that nothingness is the active agent that outlines difference and therefore makes the world intelligible in all its known material properties. This idea, curiously or maybe not so curiously, had a major impact on Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida when they were still very young (Vernon W. Cisney’s Deleuze and Derrida: Difference and the Power of the Negative comes with my very highest recommendation).

What a codependent gonna do foremost is a codependent gonna codependent. You have your people-pleasers and placaters on the one hand, per Gestalt therapy orthodoxy, and then folks like me, star of Wagner’s opera Parsifal, in whom romantic feelings of any kind induce a very specific whirling, stomach-churning delirium, as demonstrated by the serially-vomiting Stan in the early and eye-opening seasons of South Park. When I got out of a notorious treatment centre for dug and alcohol dependency in Palm Desert, California in 2009 I then lived for a year in a casual and easygoing sober living house in Palm Springs. I spent the year reading, writing, going to a movie almost daily in one or another of the little Coachella Valley municipalities, and hanging out with twelve-step people. I didn’t drink or use anything stronger than Tylenol that whole time. What I think I liked most about Southern California is that nobody seemed to think I was especially odd or unusual down there, and of course down there I don’t look especially weird. Los Angeles especially has all these streams, pulses, and swells of bold, proud, and maybe even regal weirdness. I remember being at the Farmer’s Market on Fairfax with my A.A. sponsor when another friend called to tell me that a guy we both knew from a previous treatment centre had just died of cardiac arrest partying by himself in a hotel room in Nanaimo, British Columbia. I think the constant conspiracy of silence around all this stuff—mental health, addiction, systemic poverty—is a kind of war crime being committed by the majority, and I will never stop saying so. The best thing I remember happening in Los Angeles was when my sponsor and I got to go see supreme Hungarian master Miklós Jancsó’s unequivocally bleak 1966 martial staging ground The Round-Up, part of a series on widescreen cinematography they were running at the old silent movie theatre, also on Fairfax (we got to sit on cozy couches!). While things quickly started to go tits-up-and-sideways once I got back to Canada—I’d be drunk again within a year—I will always be able to recall with warmth and fondness the drive from Palm Springs to Calgary which I came insanely close to doing in one long go. My car had poor air conditioning and it gets real, real hot in the desert in August, so I set off on my long northward trek, through Las Vegas and other sundry sights, at about four in the morning in order to get a solid head start on the sun. I drove fourteen hours that day until I finally pulled into Dillon, Montana and got myself a room for the night. I can remember and feel in my body today how overjoyed and consoled I was that I could enjoy for-me-profound and exciting adventures, in their material and spiritual properties and aspects, much better sober than lit. My sponsor always said that there isn’t anything good enough or bad enough that a drink won’t make it worse. It’s true (for about 10% of the population). A blunt no-bones elder-in-recovery here in Calgary once told me something like: yes, it is a one day at a time program, but you have to do it for the rest of your life and you need to remember that every day too. 

I already loved hockey as a little Canadian kid in the very late 1980s when, at ten, around the same time I stared guitar lessons, I began my short minor hockey career. More than any of the more or less customary NHL hockey I got to attend live in my youth (we’ll set aside the one game I got to attend in the series in ’89 where the Flames ultimately triumphed over the Canadiens and won their only Stanley Cup), the competition between the international teams at the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics totally set my whole neural network on fire. Often when I would have night terrors or little miniature psychoses as a child, I would really and truly believe I could hear an arena full of people cheering and jeering right there inside my bedroom walls. I was to be no messiah, but rather the updated middle-aged version of Richard Lindner’s painting Boy with Machine (featured most memorably in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus). I loved all the gear at my grandparents’ farm just as much as I loved my music gear at home. In the U.K., works and gear are slang related to intravenous drug use. I actually believe that pressing the record button on a machine has an effect on the entire earth system. For Deleuze, the cosmos—or, as per machine assemblage brother in crime Félix ‘the Cat’ Guattari, the Chaosmos—is the unity of all multiplicities that are, could be, or that we might imagine. The simple formula for this spatiotemporal framework: the totality is One-Many. Of course, what Deleuze is doing at least in part is once again keeping the torch of Spinoza ignited and flickering majestic in the age of quantum mechanics and tense outbursts of all kinds of things all the time. The Venus flytrap catches a fly by enticing the fly to step on the trap’s trigger which is exactly how a normal hunting trap works when it catches things. There are only so many models and forms for basic existing things and situations, and they get recycled endlessly, to the point where it gets more comic and more absurd but also more ghastly and abyssal. Store up the laughter just in case you might have accidentally won the happenstance race against sensation-rich life and signs and symbols meant puzzlingly to guide, in dream or in hand. Carl Jung echoes Nietzsche when he bemoans that the Occidental World has not been working on civilization and enlightenment anywhere near as long as the Chinese yet insists upon acting vulgar and superior (he also expresses a belief shared by Nietzsche that Heraclitus is the only worthy voice of Occidental antiquity). Jung got into the I Ching. In a piece entitled “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle,” Jung quotes the philosopher Chuang-tzu, as it would happen a contemporary of Plato: “The state in which ego and non-ego are no longer opposed is called the pivot of Tao.” Boy, do I like that. I couldn’t have put it that well given five lifetimes. A fella could really haul that bill of gods some distance, I imagine. From my vantage, assuredly, forty-six years old as of recently, I think if you stay relatively stationary and remain at steadfast private labour, you would in looking at the I Ching through the eyes of Carl Jung or the game of Go through those of Deleuze and Guattari, build a better map of the cosmos as a navigable frame in active play than you could get by accessing a quantum computer, particle accelerator, or super satellite (though those things are useful too). 

The elephant in the room, or at least the three-legged dog, is that I just got kicked off Facebook's two big social media networks. Here is my public statement, pass it around to the publicists at the debutante bash this very fortnight and enjoy the room temperature champagne: 

It is not nearly as much fun to steal a car if you don’t total it at the end—

The Round-Up (Miklós Jancsó, 1966)