The Thin Man (W. S. Van Dyke, 1934)
Pépé le Moko (Julien Duvivier, 1937)
When what you need is a mouth you go and find a mouth because a mouth knows a mouth’s work and knows it readily. It’s gross in there, puffy and moist and none of my business neither. The dentists went to great effort and expense to learn dentistry and open their own clinics so they obviously have some sort of mouth hang-up by which I have remained blissfully untouched over the whole of my life, both as a narcotics detective and then as a private dick specializing in divorce beefs and grey market hijinks, a complex planetary network connecting narcos to heads of state. I’m sorry. I know I led you astray mere moments ago. The truth is it’s really me who has the hang-up with mouths, all of them, sludgy words splashing out, septic odour, clumsy teeth, and the tongue like some Frank Herbert sand worm. I cringe and cower when I face my unconvincing smile in the mirror, toothbrush canted at a harsh upward angle, beard 45% grey, most of what was once me gradually melting away, a Spring thaw from which the mute gods gravely withdraw in cloaks and ornaments sent in by the Shah. Heh heh. As a detective I perfected seeing the misery and misfortunate in every effortful smile simply not up for the task of giving face, every missed giving-of-face like a beam of untempered truth transacted as unforced error. As my face thins and I age I start to feel like I ought to have been head of the C.I.A. I’d really have to be said to have aged into it. Sometimes when I look at strangers out and about in the course of daily life they see me and immediately check instinctually to see whether or not they are at that moment in the process of committing a visible offence. My son doesn’t talk to me anymore. He said I had a flair for standing in the door in such a fashion that he found himself unable to either remain in or leave the room. I love my son but I lack his language skills and competitive intensity and frankly he dances circles around me like Muhammad Ali when he’s being a bit of a prima donna, if you’ll excuse my saying so. Most people who I tried to love like I imagined you’d imagine loving the beloved, were not the right people just as I seldom am, although just good enough can be alright when you find some fetching North African textile worker with whom to spend one golden night…out of the reaches of informants and malingerers. I await the revolution with fervour and level steadiness. I was never a slave of the State Apparatus. I believe in a basic minimum income for all people, rapid transition to zero-growth economy, automation of as much of the labour force as humanly possible, Lol. I learned from studying the Old Testament that man’s destiny is crash and burn, spoils and consequences, mass mobilization and open graves. I don’t believe in Manichaeist binary hoodwink and I don’t like what it does to the groupthink. Play it as it lays on the window displays on every second page until the camera cuts away and you were only ever a rumour. I got into police work, law enforcement, and freelance sneakiness because I wanted to do the kind of work motivated by what daily life throws in our hapless faces. But if the beat cops goes looking for how it all went wrong you can bet he’s been whistling insidious nationalistic songs and deploying slurs in the so-called correction of wrongs. The meatheads will not inherit the earth, but geology will gradually burry them along with the rest of us. Today’s heavy metal poisoning is tomorrow’s newfangled gemstone. Once we lose consciousness totally they cram us in so tight together we become diamonds. On the streets of any major city I watch the parts that are order and the parts that are chaos coexist, for better or for worse and with wild swings in polarity forever upending the operational grid, the Hermeneutic Horizon. Let us even attempt to enumerate all the ticks and jerks and little mistakes we made today. Apperception is errant, it’s not your fault...
The closest simplified model the cosmos could resemble would be pure flux inside a translucent ball.
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