I would tell you in all earnestness that I’m sorry I hurt you but you are exceedingly lovely when you cry so I am of at least two minds.
In 1816, when the sun barely shone for a year due to a volcanic winter triggered by the eruption of Mount Tambora on Sumbawa Island in Indonesia, the eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley was staying with her husband Percy, Lord Byron, and Dr. John Polidori at the Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva in Switzerland, where to beat the doldrums Byron challenged each of the others to come up with a gangbusters ghost story for the ages. Drugs and alcohol were definitely involved, but it is worth noting that Percy Shelly liked hash and laudanum but did not drink. In short order, Mary had a vivid dream featuring a "pale student of unhallowed arts" kneeling beside a hideous, reassembled humanoid being as it emerges torpidly back into a cursed condition of sentient awareness. Byron’s prompt and Mary’s dream were to prove the kernel from which the classic novel Frankenstein was to emerge. Bleak times? “It was the year 1816,” Paul West has Dr. Polidori muse in his sublime 1989 historical novel Lord Byron’s Doctor: “My life began then, and all else.”
Long before the theme park et cetera, Universal Studios set up shop in Southern California in 1915 when it built a studio lot in Universal City on land bought with prophetic good sense and no small amount of temerity by company honcho Carl Laemmle the previous year. One thing that Universal quickly learned and that no small number of small or micro ‘indie’ studios know very well to this day is that good horror movies are essentially cash cows because they are relatively cheap to make and can reliably be expected to pull in audiences everywhere. Universal had huge financial successes with a spate of atmospheric Gothic horror classics starring Lon “Man of a Thousand Faces” Chaney and born of classy intellectual property like The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925). Both Universal properties from 1931, Dracula and Frankenstein are not only among the most remarkable and innovative films of the early sound era, they also more or less singlehandedly saved Universal Studios from bankruptcy. Carl Laemmle Jr. bought the rights to Dracula after he saw a version adapted for the stage on Broadway. Instead of picking an actor with an existing contract at Universal, Carl Laemmle Jr. chose Bella Lugosi, star of the Broadway production. The iconic appearance of Boris Karloff in Frankenstein came at a cost. Karloff endured up to four hours of make-up every morning, and because his costume was so heavy and the lighting rigs so hot…he started to lose a considerable amount of weight. The lighting rigs in Classical Hollywood were so hot they could start fires (and did). Bella Lugosi famously downplayed Karloff's work in Frankenstein, qualifying that he considered Karloff primarily a "make-up artist" rather than a genuine actor steeped in the craft.
What’s my deal? None. I have no deal to offer a living soul. I’m just sitting here with the kid from Ju-On attacking the back half of a day-old box of assorted Hoopla donuts. What makes me believe myself such an expert that I can go ahead and speak on behalf of the monsters? I woke up knowing of the horrors to come but I could do nothing. Cassandra, daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy, who was sentenced by Apollo to prophesy the truth and be believed by no one. “All our knowledge is derived from infidels,” Percy Shelly is declared to have boasted.
The sea, the sea, the dark blue sea,
The bright, the pure, the ever free.
Edward John Trelawny on fair weather friend Percy Shelley: “barring drugs and accidents, he might have lived as long as his father—to ninety.” Trelawny believed that Shelley’s vessel was probably hijacked on the water and Shelley robbed and killed, or that it was a malicious ramming, an act of hot-headed caprice, the vessel’s occupant(s) in due course casualties of the sinking. What kind of monster was Percy Shelley? He was the best kind of spoiled, little brat. He wanted to have his cake and eat it too, turning the King’s England, all the while, into a foul open-air zoo. The angelic toddler who bangs on the table and proclaims its rancid epithets, servants running about in dismay and confusion. King baby and spoiled, little brat are not equivalent. King baby is all diapers, lung power, and demands, whereas spoiled, little brat will use intelligence and cunning to really and truly fuck shit up. When Percy Shelly wrote The Necessity of Atheism in 1811, not yet twenty, he knew what he was doing and he went ahead and did it, turning himself into a No-Go Zone for his whole family and all other members of polite society who’d formerly known him.
Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate'er it touches, and obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of men, and, of the human frame,
A mechanised automaton.
If you were a white rock and roll star in the 1950s the best way to demonstrate credibility and be a hardcore badass was to to die in an airplane or automobile crash. That’s what happened to Eddie Cochran in 1960 when the ascending earth angel entertainer died in a car accident at the age of twenty-one on the way to Heathrow Airport at the end of a successful UK tour. Witnesses to the accident describe Cochran throwing his body over his fiancée, songwriter Sharon Sheeley, to protect her during impact, perhaps in the process sealing his own fate. At the age of eighteen, in 1958, Sheeley wrote the hit “Poor Little Fool” for Ricky Nelson, which had the distinction of becoming the first number one hit on the inaugural Billboard Hot 100 chart. The sublime Eddie Cochran tune “Somethin' Else,” in all its pummelling sturm und drang commodity fetishism, peaked at #58 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1959 and was written by Sharon Sheeley and Eddie’s older brother Bob. My goodness, now doesn’t that just look like a Freudian case study if anything ever did? I can see it on the billboards now: Kane and Abel Vs. the Kustom Kar Kommandos.
Some people like to have a good time and avoid rustling up any form of discomfort or conflict. These folks finesse in order to forestall a mess. There are two kinds of oversexed people, good sports and bad sports, and the kind of people I’m addressing are for the most part oversexed and good sports about it or trying their Sunday damndest to be. There are hot and cold lovers and everybody for the most part prefers a hot one because they are dependably fun and high-energy…at least when all’s going good. Hot water bottle lover, buried beneath weighted blankets, please and appease me, lover dear. In order to be the kind of person a whole bunch of other people can justify sleeping with, however, you need two primary characteristics and fun ain’t one of them: 1) you have to be low maintenance for extended periods of time; 2) you have to be good at agreeing with people, or at least appearing to, even when you don’t. We are handcuffed in this world when we stand on principle because even having principles at all immediately condemns us. What the people-pleasers and placaters of this world really and truly want is to shake you hysterically and yell incomprehensibly until you lose consciousness or are dead. When I was much younger, quite dashing, and occasionally sleeping with a few people at a time, I learned the most cloyingly obvious lesson more than a handful of times (because stubborn and selfish): other people have feelings too; stop pretending the world is your oyster, you aren’t even a property owner. When you lie to somebody and then are subsequently pleased with yourself for tricking them…that’s when you know it’s time to seek some form of council higher than your own.
Once when I was a young man a slightly older woman put on fancy lingerie in an effort to startle and, you know, stimulate me, throwing me off pretty good as I entered the bedroom a touch tipsy and genuinely surprised. I figured I had better stand there and take it in as throughly as I could manage because I was absolutely certain that nobody else was ever going to do such a wonderful and harebrained thing for me again. Did I break that woman’s heart? Well, no, not then and there. As for what ultimately happened: I know for a fact that we both know that we were each culpable. Communication could bulldoze a better, less thorny path if people would stop putting themselves in the way of everything that isn’t them or their adopted lifestyle politic. Not even you are who you think you are. It’s a large part of why you dream. At no point or node along the fabled political spectrum is anybody practicing pattern recognition at all effectively. Not every synthesis is a solution and not every fool is worthy of a say in the matter. Convictions, stipulates Robert Anton Wilson, create convicts. When I defended my master’s thesis back in 2004, one of the auditing professors asked me what we are supposed to do if ‘politics’ is just another word for ‘division’ and there is no foreseeable stabilization in sight, and my answer was that we should interrogate our own presuppositions daily. In the town where nobody talks about anything, people get their feelings hurt all the time for no good goddamn reason. Or worse. That's part of how offenders become serial offenders. Sometimes I’m far too principled and I really lord it over people, but sometimes I’m pleasurable to be around, and that is largely because I tend to find new information much more exciting than I do threatening. This is another thing I share in common with ace French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. What’s got me most hooked in Art and Life is the capital-N New.
The sun is both the furnace and the forge. We are here on its leniency. We cannot understand the scale of the sun, which fuses in the neighbourhood of 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium every second. You can damage your eyes by looking directly at the sun but your imagination cannot do anything with the fusion of 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium every second or four million tons of solid matter being turned into pure energy every second. “The image of consolatory gestures,” writes Antoine Volodine in Radiant Terminus (a book whose title very much is an unsubtle reference to orgasm), “was overlaid with wanton images and sensations of skin, of flesh, of pawing, of masculine gropes, of possibly shared breaths, of tumbles on the bed, and urgent penetrations. The physical nostalgia of coupling, handed down over two hundred million animal years. He suppressed all this as best he could, this surge of salacious filth. But, in his consciousness and beyond it, the filth overflowed.” Maybe down there in the depths of the human orgasm is a little, flaming window into hell that doesn’t even really give you much of a picture of hell the same way we don’t currently have much of a mental picture of the sun. Is a mushroom cloud a cartoon parody of human orgasm? Is the joke at long last on us? This is of course the of age of porn stars with direct knowledge comparing the penis of the President of the United States of America to a mushroom. It sometimes really blows my mind how much online life today seems like an old J.G. Ballard story in living colour!
One of my favourite lines from 21st century literary fiction comes to us care of the 2017 Javier Marías novel Berta Isla: “we never really know if someone has been harmed until their story is complete, and that takes time.” When the motion and commotion cease for a moment perhaps there’s a chance we’ll breathe. Life is a moving target and that’s how it sneaks up behind you and knifes you. With the right practice you’ll learn to stare at a dangling hood ornament for hours at a time. “This book owes its life to death,” concedes the great Hélène Cixous in 2016’s Death Shall Be Dethroned: Los, A Chapter, the Journal. The name Los connects both to loss and the Spanish definitive masculine article, but it also harkens back to William Blake for whom Los was the fallen or earthly form of Urthona, suggesting the inauguration of an archetypal trans identity, though one should be careful to grant to the prefix trans its full capabilities with respect to combination and passage, including but extending far beyond mere considerations of gender and sexuation. Cixous: “One doesn’t die. One comes and goes between two absences of memory.” In his book on his friend Hélène Cixous, H.C. for Life, That Is to Say…, Jacques Derrida ruminates on the eternal made available to mortal beings by cycles and substitutions, resorting even to biblical metaphor (both he and Cixous were/are Jewish), musing on the list of sequential Jonahs, one Jonah ever replacing another Johah in the forward march of time. Of course, if the triumph of life over death rests in the suspension of the centrality of the individual then the individual Jonah is no longer a thing of all that much cosmic significance or relevance, presumably, from even a research standpoint.
The heavens. At long last. Unmade in spite of our gaze, the parallax of perspective stomach-churning. Bound notebooks, lockboxes, apartments, cities, the individual languages colloquially called tongues. Our arms protecting our chests like family crests. Everything is clutching itself in and fastening itself up in wait of whatever stage of entropy it is, as depicted in The Wizard of Oz, whereby that which was fastened steadily to the earth is fastened there no longer and anything of inconsiderable mass, such as yourself or your loved ones, goes flying off into the wild blue yonder with hardly a first whisper of complaint.
Curiouser and curiouser: I have but one solo Lou Reed record and but one Bruce Springsteen record. Obviously I also have John Cale's Paris 1919 but I have a bunch of John Cale stuff...
At some point some time back I noticed a trend where Baby Boomers online were regularly bemoaning how young people today don’t know who the Beatles were or scoff openly at the notion that the Beatles could be of any lingering significance or value. Oh, I laugh too. Do any of you raving Beatlemania outpatients remember who Sarah Bernhardt was? Not one of you does…except for the guy who thinks I’m talking about sassy comedienne Sandra Bernhard. No, Sarah Bernhardt was the most famous actor or actress on planet earth in the period directly before cinema. She died, in point of fact, before the cinema could grow up enough to do anything meaningful with her. Today, our imagination’s portrait of her could only ever be hazy and scant of resource.
Tallulah Bankhead, the sophisticated and frank Broadway legend revered the world over by gay men who dig theatre and gossip, in some ways followed in the path of grande dame Sarah Bernhardt, almost entirely eschewing appearance in motion pictures in order to continue mining the great yawning ineffable from up from under stage lights before a rapt live audience. Tallulah’s best movie is popularly believed to be Alfred Hitchcock’s wartime pressure-cooker Lifeboat (1944) in which it can indeed be observed that the great stage actress knows how to have the right wry sort of fun with unambiguously silly make-believe in a way that the camera itself cannot help but assiduously enjoy. That is the main difference between cinema and theatre: in the cinema you are playing the whole thing to one audience member and the audience member in question happens to be filming you.
Geraldine Page was likewise the biggest and most highly touted actress in all mythological New York City once upon a fabled time, but the movies rarely seemed up to doing us much help in remembering her from the remote and occluded hilltop of the transglobal global present. (The Internet was the Tower of Babel all along.) Do yourself a favour if you’ve never seen the film and swallow your pride and check out Woody Allen’s uncharacteristically heavy 1978 Chekhov/Bergman mashup Interiors in which Page gives as ruthless, festering, darkly humorous, and aggressively exposed a performance as any ever before captured on celluloid. The only performance that truly makes it as performance is the performance that achieves true insanity, argues the boisterously lounging Mick Jagger in Performance (1970). Well, okay, if that’s what you’re after, you Theatre of Cruelty geeks, I would advise you to take a look at and very seriously consider Geraldine Page. I believe this gig just might be her living destiny.
Part of what is not only noteworthy but outright historic about the unique celebrity of Charlie Chaplin, the cherubic itinerant tramp with the toothbrush moustache and mesmerizing balletic feats, was that his was the first mechanically reproduced face to be seen by and to have become recognizable to people from everywhere in the world you could take a projector. In a sense, if you really take the requisite time to consider it, Charlie Chaplin is much more like one interchangeable bottle of Coca-Cola or another than you or I will ever be.
A handwritten prompt from the expedient beetle-beaked drones down in Arts and Entertainment. Ahem, achoo, as-salamu alaykum. Is it just me or can we all agree that fifty-five-year-old 2026 Beth Orton is a seamless meld of Marianne Faithfull and Stuart A. Staples that goes down like a nice woody and maybe sort of cinnamony single malt of most distinguished vintage?
I killed my dinner with karate—
kick ’em in the face, taste the body;
shallow work is the work that I do.
- Joanna Newsom, "The Book of Right-On"
Aside from the fact that it could not conceivably have been made a year earlier or a year later, Zabriskie Point, Italian master of ennui Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 contribution to the short-lived Southern California Campus Uprising genre, features what is arguably the All Time All-American Boy-Girl Screen Pick-Up. Having just stolen a small aircraft because he is wanted for a cop killing he did not perpetrate but which he cannot explain away easily, Mark, played by drop-out ruffian Mark Frechette, who later got into communes and bank robbery, manages to successfully use his hijacked airplane to pick up Daria Halprin’s Daria, who is driving her boss’s ’52 Buick across the desert. Mark and Daria were a happening real life counterculture couple there for a hot minute, like the Isis and Osiris of Rolling Stone magazine, but then Daria briefly married Dennis Hopper, with whom she had a daughter, and ultimately she pursued a career in Gestalt and creative movement therapies.
All at once an absolute wild man, a guitar virtuoso, and an institutionally-certified ethnomusicologist, John Fahey of Takoma Park, Maryland was hired by Antonioni to do some of that patented Fahey American Primitive finger-picking music for the Zabriskie Point soundtrack, even managing to get himself flown to Rome. Perhaps some music for the sprawling desert orgy set piece, say. Fahey took exception to Antonioni immediately and thought the film was going to be a disreputable flower power hoodwink and a sinister exploitative ground operation. In a piece from his book How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life, Fahey claims that he and Antonioni got so drunk over one final, decisive dinner together that they found themselves in a loud, sloppy, very physical fight, rolling around the floor of a fancy restaurant, grappling. What Fahey had found most irritating and ultimately unconscionable about Antonioni was all the snobbish, knee-jerk anti-Americanism.
I only ever wanted to be unspeakably gorgeous, impeccable in my affairs, and good at basically everything. You know, like your average, everyday James Bond type person...
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Clark Gable’s sweaty, nervous handshake is the only real truth you will ever know, with your horse’s eyes and your halitosis. Montgomery Clift doesn’t know if he even cares very much for rodeo anymore. Did you hear that?! Montgomery Clift can no longer feel it even when he’s being gored by horns and hooves! All he desires is a hole to get drunk and die in, perhaps protected against rainwater and other environmental hassles. Obviously he doesn’t want to be fucking about long in the dying. I’m sorry, but what happens if we stop and soberly assess the innumerable crises faced by our planet at the present time? Do we have the stones to look at what we have collectively wrought? Any alien intelligence that got a glance at us as we currently present ourselves, all but flagrantly, would upon cursory go-over determine that we must be the dazed survivors of some horrible catastrophe. Joke’s on them. Tag. You’re It.
“I can smell the look on your face, cowboy,” says a defiantly flirtatious and openly tittering Thelma Ritter to Clark Gable over a table where drinkers convene early on in John Huston’s 1961 hot mess masterpiece The Misfits. When the once young, elegant, and promising succumb to liquor and licentiousness, going grey in the hair and regularly missing a beat or two, this is how they will have the temerity to put it to you: I can smell the look on your face, cowboy. When the barflies are excited you just know there’s got to be a hot brick of shit sitting freshly unwrapped nearby. It’s all about the encumbrances of our biology and the putrescent mucous of swampy prehistory. Clark Gable looks like he would absolutely not ever do any job that failed to require as its prerequisite mature good looks, dumb and anxious friendliness, mild-to-middling inebriation, and nothing else, thy Kingdom come. It is sort of unabashedly just who Clark Gable is, but it is also a large part of why the story of The Misfits, on and offscreen, is such an overall downer. Of female lead Marilyn Monroe and her fly-by-night husband Arthur Miller, author of the screenplay for The Misfits, we can surmise with total certainty that both did a tremendous amount of drinking and chatting in their daily lives. In a way, the weary, exposed, and earthy film that The Misfits ends up being is a dust devil in the form of a film production and an actual movie dust devil too. Sometimes you have to be the dispassionate documentarian of your day-drinking desperado buddies and the situations you’ve all, uh, shook up. There’s a mood for that and once again Thelma Ritter has just the words: “The slogan of Nevada is anything goes…but then don’t complain if it went.”
For the director and for the audience there is more shadow in this shadowplay than the players know or are aware of. It were as though Eli Wallach as Guido Delinni, the only recognizably normal professional working this great big conspicuous circus, has found himself anointed Janitor of Lunacy, using a broom and tray to suppress the blows and the outcries of defunct celebrity automaton machines with outmoded tech, in and around various licensed drinking establishments. Marilyn Monroe at her best always seems like someone who did all the preparation and research possible and all of a sudden none of it is worth sweet fuck all, faces and places all depersonalized and scattered like puzzle pieces. She is always approximately breathy-voiced Theresa Russell perfectly prepared to explain special relativity in her husband Nicholas Roe’g Insignificance (1985).
Anybody watching The Misfits without much frame of reference would assume that Montgomery Clift would be the first from the beaten and bandaged cast to drink himself to death or commit suicide, but the sad truth is that Marilyn beat him by four years. She doesn’t seem nearly as badly damaged as Clift in The Misfits, but I think Marilyn hid away most of the substantial hurt where it couldn’t be seen by anybody…or not if she could help it. When she is exposed or vulnerable she becomes volatile. Spark plug. John Huston was the perfect director to legitimate and take a step back from the Great Marilyn & Arthur National Cocktail Hour. His 1953 film Beat the Devil is the closest thing to a straight-up pub crawl up and down the Amalfi coast in all decadent-phase Classical Hollywood cinema, and we were always going to need to bring Mr. Huston into discussions when we were going to be getting ourselves around to discussing hang out or hanging out movies, their rich history and transcendent power in certain hands…at certain times. Behold some of Huston’s very finest: Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), Fat City (1972), The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), The Man Who Would Be King (1975), Wise Blood (1979), and, last but nary the least, Joyce’s The Dead (1987). You hang out when you watch these movies, and you’re damn proud of it, considering it time spent in the richest way possible.
The underlined implicit-but-illicit alchemy, the bearer of bad dust devils: when everybody on payroll is drinking then all working is drinking and all drinking working, and never again shall a lucid line of demarkation find traction nor anybody be able enough of mind and body to help the injured, shit-faced combatants who’ve gone and dropped some semi-remote place or other. Some were the shining angels of their hour who rather than rejecting cooption directly, pulled out the rug from under it peremptorily, like Warrior Gods. Some are found bleating on their chosen instrument in nightmarish tones of nightmarish woes, always at the most nightmarish and outright diabolical hours, disrupting all rhythm and good order with steady auditory complaint excreted by demons. Not to put too fine a point on it, but our token maidservant to audience identification, Eli Wallach’s Guido Delinni, Janitor of Lunacy, ruefully recalls for us, whilst driving, that he spent a good part of the Second World War attacking all manner of targets from the sky. The Misfits is about how what is unruly in the wind is unruly in us also, the each in fact a testament to the other or the other way around, all of us shit-faced in our pseudo-Irish finery the live-long. Tally ho! When it is time to be the storm that storms its storm in defiance of God is when it is time as well to be a photographic negative. A photograph is the passage of light through an artfully cracked eggshell, captured as a negative of itself. Eli Wallach/Guido Delinni/Janitor of Lunacy, as though making a concession to nerves: “If it weren’t for the nervous people in the world, we’d all still be eating each other.” Who were we this whole time if not the few lucky survivors of the impasse of physical contact?
