La petite Aurore et Guy Damien Lafleur

La petite Aurore, quelle horreur, you lived twelve months on oatmeal and Planters peanuts and doll hair, so I'd imagine, being imaginative, and they whipped you with a belt and burned your hands and cheeks on the stove, and all the good Catholic boys and girls of Dear Québec were traumatized forever because they made a movie about it and put it on TV, and of course there were only two or three channels back then, and this poor tortured girl became the best ever emblem of Québec's mongrel Catholicism and all the little French Canadian kids knew it plain as day, even as the so-called adults prevaricate, just as the plains of Abraham stand dismal and grey...je me souviens...

Guy Damien Lafleur, born in Thurso, Québec the year after my parents were born, but not in Québec, remains an all-time leading scorer for the Montreal Canadiens hockey franchise, his numbers right up there with those of Maurice “Rocket” Richard, the only other player who competes with him for status as most popular among true traditionalist Canadiens fans. At fifteen years of age and a paltry one-hundred-thirty-five pounds, Lafleur joined the Québec Jr. Aces and managed to somehow score a whopping one-hundred-sixty-one goals in one hundred games.

The Ol' Misplaced Derby Hat Job [a Comic Sketch]

 

Mr. Jackboot Jackpots, prophets make prophecies, oye. Yeah, Kid Columbus, bustin' your rumpus to follow us up the snuzzleguts and make a mark out of all of us. The Self transitions in time. Be careful what you insinuate! you got you a fungus in the bungus? a hibiscus in your soiled maroon pup tent? Have you seen my Derby hat? I've seemed to've misplaced it? Jefferson Dildo Hemingsworth! How dumb and directionless your cruelty is. Are you inured to your own cruelty?! Peekaboo, psycho! I know I ought to behave better, but in order to do so you see I must have my misplaced Derby hat first in hand and then atop temporary head. Astonishing. You are like the cunt of a moose unto, uh, things all loose on the goose. On the gander. If...if I may loosen my tie. Goddamn, Baby Brigadier. Money is not real. Money is not consideration. Why don't we test our sexual compatibility before making any hasty decision about the definitely stollen hat?

What the fuck is fucktually fucktioning right now, Little Vowel? We are standing here live from the Great Raid of 1840. Horseshit, and I'm confident as a ram that I'm as credible as I am, Sam. You were once very warm and engaging and you made lenses like Spinoza. You were fired for discrimination but deserved no astringency along the meridian. Why does the body move as it does, as though operated like a puppet among a myriad of filthy and frenetic puppets puppeteered by puppeteers unable to send communications back and forth for some reason? What guides people is mood. And beloved objects like a hat or a broach...or the plump and milky handjob girls at the dairy. The what? The...the girls...at the dairy...who are merciful and quick in their tawdry ministrations. My thing is me having good time, capital-F Fuck the torpedoes. A man at cross-purposes. Muse much? I'm not sure. I've lived 17,300 years and I have not seen anything all that worthy of special acclaim. Well, consider that a kind of hasty beginning.

My father would like to shake your hand. The Great Goddamn Godandus?!! Help! I'm on a popularity contest! Awaketh. You do not know if you are the victim or the perpetrator of a crime we have not yet specified. People don't give a fuck. They throw a throwing star 'tween your frizzed-out eyes. Could be your mother dressed as your brother. It just don't relent. Lonesome and squirrelly, judge piggybacking jury. Are you here to dismantle me and shut me down kaput ad infinitum? Is that the whisper of the machine's walnut wish? Go fish, do what you wish: ain't no demands be crying in on me. Me neither. If you give over the Derby hat you definitely fuckin stole and got on yer this here minute.    

In Consideration of Intelligent Machines

 

Originally, when we were impossibly naive, we would respond to René Descartes’ assertion that one thinks therefore one is by saying how is the thinking thing and the thing that ‘is’ for sure the same thing. They are the same thing because they are separate and also united and this is the nature of molecular life, everything opened up upon a great singular multiplicity, as made plenty clear by physicists and also by philosopher Gilles Deleuze and his compatriote professionnel, institutional psychiatrist Félix Guattari, he of transversal intra-complexive modalities and profound respect for psychotic/schizo insights. The spiritual history of man is his geology, layers stacked upon layers, and even the most dead and inert material things, a stone or a dead branch, are positively bustling. It has been averred that Albert Einstein fell into ultimate despair of his desired but unobtainable ‘unified field theory,’ but let’s a moment get more visceral and say that what stymied and ultimately defeated Einstein were the abysses and voids in the math, a conundrum that has driven future theoretical mathematicians and physicists to get into the racket in the first place! We know electrons and protons communicate across time in ways that defy our metrics, and I guess we know that there is dark energy and dark matter, because even though we have no means of perceiving, measuring, or assessing these opaque principles nowhere to be physically found in physical fact, the mathematics seems to require them. Where is the math headed, right? Artificial Intelligence, all across the line, running your air traffic and city traffic et cetera. And why not? Artificial Intelligence can do wild kinds of math it can’t even explain to us, so pitiably equipped are we. In 2019, the great engineer, inventor, and polymath James Lovelock, who would die in 2022 at the age of 103, argues stridently and pretty convincingly in his book Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence that incomprehensibly intelligent machines and silicon-based life will bring intelligence to bear everywhere it is lacking, and sorely so, taking control out of the hands of human beings so wonky in their daily toil and folly that they're wont on occasion to drop souped-up bat viruses on the floor ‘cause they ain’t taking their damn time…and so forth. 

The Tree of Life

 It is, therefore, a great source of virtue for the practised mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change [relative to] invisible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be able to leave them behind altogether. The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land. 
- Hugo of Saint Victor, Didascalicon 

Boychile Janebirkin, a Diary

For Patricia Highsmith & Raymond Queneau

I just got out of the hospital. June, 2023. Somehow I intentionally threw out my last journal accidentally, which will only make sense if you are a bipolar person like me or have another chronic psychotic disorder like schizophrenia. I just spent three hours looking at photographs of cherry blossoms ('sakura') in Japan.

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Transect the binary apparatus. I am going to write a book about universal chaos and the transystemiticity of existing on-the-ground administrative realities. Everybody I talk to is either lying to protect themselves or lying for purposes of expedience, and they do this all day long, even in their love lives and their professional ones. They don't have much to talk about so they do indeed generally just Netflix and chill. I came from a generation of idiotic, selfish children. My God! What are the subsequent ones going to look like?!

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It's almost November. My eyes are as blind as sad rhythms. I can't function and any stranger can see it and it's embarrassing. It is like I was laid down and laid away. I tell myself that I once had a chance but that only makes me mad at myself and I guess at God. God is a real lavish prick who blinds you by throwing stardust in your eyes. Did I have a chance? I could not possibly've had. Joy is just the neurochemical reward of a lowborn, slithering sort of species.

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What did Ralph Waldo Emerson think he was talking about with this transparent eyeball business? It sounds more like some kind of H.P. Lovecraft trip. Mar-mar-mar-mar-mar-marmalade! Not everybody needs to be fucking everybody in the ass all the time, you know.

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The Old World is still here and it is still crumbling.

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February, 2024. I can tell important stuff is going on everywhere and that I'll be the last to know. Extrasensory perception is the Earl Grey tea of psychosis. I am going to write a book about God split into three parts, but not the customary three: omniscience, creation, oversight. My personal Freudian primal scene involved a hotel room and a cathode ray tube. Got home late tonight but felt scattered so I plopped down and watched Dillinger is Dead (1969), an absolutely perfect film.

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I Heart Cinnamon Hearts. My mother asked me if I could possibly sink any lower. "This," I said, stomping one foot, "is rock-hard surface." How do we actively think future intelligence systems? Aldous Huxley never came anywhere near adequately accounting for chaos. People don't want to take a hit and thereby ensure they take the hit. I called my mother a simpleton.

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The body will crouch, lean, and pivot to the left (often) in order to conceal something or protect itself. A personal deficit is cosmic accounting. On the implicate side of things virtuality is crunching the numbers at speeds beyond consideration of speed. I remember once when I was little I stole a porno mag and hid it in my dresser. I don't do rote operations or basically follow orders at all.

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Sometimes I think you can tell the quality of a man by how patient and tolerant he is with his children. To process this is a process, miss. Frivolous. Chelsea is running out of what little hope remained after the Pilsners and mob scene. If you had to guess, how many medications do you think I've been prescribed since 2009? I want to share my work and my life. We'll see. Chelsea will go quick into full-on interpretive delirium. We're all just playing Pattern Recognition for Dummies. And you can tell Mark Zuckerberg that I didn't break his rinky-dink website.

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Thinking about carnivorous plants. I once called somebody 'scrumptious' and immediately felt frightfully perverse. Today I gave a homeless man a carrot. I called Chelsea and said I was sorry if I fucked her situation up. The burlap sack is what the cat shat back. Le chat dans le sac. 

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If the people who are after you seem uncertain, do not hesitate to own them. I wonder if Sun Tzu ever advised something like this. The wisdom would probably have to be even older, if you stop and think about it. I mean, really. Human culture and bacterial cultures are fundamentally the same thing. Heart is a Ticker, Brain is a Circuitmobile. I got no pressing business to attend to and I like it that way. People will never get as uncomfortable as they need to be in order to start helping to change the world. The intelligence community runs on extortion. I want a pickled egg out of the strange blue comb jar. I will very slowly attempt to very slowly attempt. The tricks Christ pulled with resurrection, including his own, were cheap and putrid tricks. Even Donald Trump could stage a bullshit resurrection. I remember being little and how much I loved playing "Thunderstruck" by AC/DC on my little guitar. Embouchure. EmbroSure. Now with real embryos. I'll be oh so much more quirky once we land in Albuquerque.

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I did not interact with a single person. Wisest thing I never did.

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Daialogics over Dialectics. I think I found a cryptogram or maybe I'm getting sicker again. Einstein's big problem was simply that he wanted a unified field theory. I am going through a protracted constipation nightmare. Why can't we just get together and overhaul this whole motherfucker? I think folks are petrified in poor habit more than anything. They raised my Seroquel dose. 

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Don't all speak up at once.

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Holy Mother, the sunset is unreal. I am wondering how much overlap there is between 'topoanalysis' and 'calculus.' Captain Sloppy holding strong! Did I get any on my face?! Vincent van Gogh cut off part of an ear because he was an alcoholic and an artist and a sadist. The Brussels Griffon has Geman as well as Belgian roots. Cops sure can suck. Hospitals are crumbling into their foundations. Une petite hachette pour la croissance et la développement. When I'm alone I can do my Bill Cosby impersonation. William Wordsworth's worthless turd births. Very often I don't know if I want to talk or not. Call me gun-shy. That ol' hippie with the walker next door who is always so kind and endearing is it turns out also a virulent and raving racist. It took me aback. At least the woman from last night knew her St. Augustine. It's frightening out here amongst the bodysnatchers. Pass the wiseacre a stone and let it gum up his phone. Cry me a fucking river, Big Red.      

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The old racist hippie is feeding peas and mango to the birds. He says they'll eat anything that goes slower then ten kilometers per hour. Is humanity actually worth significant restorative efforts? I am not hurt by how stupid people are because it's merely a direct result of how stupid they always were. I don't want to go on being a regrettable thing that happened to people indefinitely. The fact that everybody everywhere seems to be behaving like the German middle classes in the 1930s is serious cause for concern. I got drunk on Cutty Sark and did not hear back from Rosalind. However, Ilana did call and was also drunk, even though she tried to say she wasn't, so we hooked up and both have new sober dates.  

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You can't please everybody, but you may well be astounded to discover all the varied kinds of ways you've displeased them. It can almost be an adrenaline high. Today somebody called me Girl Interrupted as a slur. There remains a future for certain, but it remains unclear as to whether or not I'm going to really benefit from that. I'm afraid that sex has to be done with people whose presence you can stomach. I'm going to put on Claire Denis' Faulkner-homage Les salauds and smoke a ganger.

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I drew with black marker the Pillars of Hercules on the cleavage of a Mediterranean woman in a black brassiere and cherry-red lipstick. No bye, no aloha. THIS IS THE WRATH OF GOD SPEAKING. I'M GOING TO COME DOWN AND TEAR THE APPLE CORES OUT OF YOUR THROATS, BOYS.

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Meshes of Go. The Go board. Wei-chi, Baduk. I have paisley premonitions. False modesty will get you laypersons nowhere with me. What is left in my chintzy plastic cup? Nothing but the howling reverberant laughter of that despicable fiend Maximilien Robespierre. Why am I the only pro around here who still pisses their pants? It's not easy being green. Life will deal a dirty dog dirty. Michelle, ma belle, I loathe you. Baby, stay still, and let me brand this Turkish Crescent on your face. Onanism is a serviceable solution (tee hee). No hablo ingles compañera. Eat pussy for Palestine or whatever. Nobody will address me straight and that is because I instil fear. I need a viewing space not subject to light pollution. I've been studying the flux of geese. Existential therapy for teenage lycanthropes, just like the Cramps promised, and frankly the chosen ultra-powerful weaklings, the fuzzy and fanged cohort, are forever the only thing to grock of any note on the intracosmic CCTV. I AM HOT FOR TEACHER. My website has beaucoup cookies. Paradise is a lean cat. Eric Dolphy was the leanest of the lean cats and he cut it too close to the grain. We are not all human. Some of us are moonmen from 1950s television. Beginnings and endings are very important for movies. I guess I got shittered in the Hot Tub Time Machine or something. Me and the baddy I pulled just by being smart. Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Me, pagan?

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Went and saw Kinds of Kindness at a nearby shopping mall. I did not like the film, though specialized sensors throughout my body did respond intensely to Margaret Qualley, who I've nicknamed Abigail Rottentail because she holds no permanent shape and in this movie has many hairstyles. What is the lesson this movie is trying to convey respective of destiny, pattern, and repetition? The director Yorgos Lanthimos definitely doesn't know. He must have been constantly hounding the script supervisor: where are we?! what is happening?! You know what? Solitude is the ultimate expression of fanatical neediness and I do sure as the tides fanatically need my solitude. High school was a disaster, remember? A sordid popularity contest overseen by stupid and cruel adults. The hollow platitudes of the multitudes. The elephant in the room is that it's not clear there's anything you can really actually do to help the person who is suffering. It's the evening of July 23, 2024. As far as concerns Rosalind? I'm liable to imagine I would do only slightly better given a second chance.  

For Hannah Höch

L’île n’y a pas

 

Eureka

In his 2022 masterpiece Pacifiction, which I had a hand in programming and which I still cannot get out of my head, Albert Serra for the first time in his career finds himself in possession of the money and production resources to make a major international art movie, which is what he does, as though he had always been quietly waiting for the inevitable moment. Pacifiction is like the earlier Serra features in theme and preoccupation exclusively; the form and mode are branching out, hardly looking back. On the other hand, in 2023's Eureka, Argentinean director Lisandro Alonso, who I've also helped program, absorbs the opportunity to spend and deploy more in order to stencil the outline of a more or less conventional international and generations-spanning art movie and then superimpose his own semi-transparent map so that a navigable system can begin to open up—different topographies will be made to do their different jobs and be readymade and permanent in their proper respective places. In the sections set in the United States, Alonso tells a visually and iconographically familiar story of crime, punishment, poverty, and moral fatigue. He moves much more like himself as a director, even when out on a limb, than he does a commercial film director, and naturally a routine highway traffic stops takes approximately as long here as it would in real life. Because of the sometimes lethargic or opiated blocks of uneventful duration and because of the preponderance of blues, reds, and purples in the colour scheme, the stuff in Eureka set in the U.S. resembles very much to me the fascinating and decidedly Grand Guignol 2019 Nicolas Winding Refn series Too Old to Die Young, which none of the rest of movie does. You have to adapt to each eco-locality and space-in-itself. The landscapes and the topography assert their influence and the artist rests suspended in sensorial receptivity. Here Eureka draws attention repeatedly to a certain debt it owes Apichatpong Weerasethakul's sublime Memoria (2021), though Eureka is more an almanac and Memoria a zeroed-in death trip (for a world that's forgotten how to die and to grieve). To give Alonso his due credit, whereas we have recently seen no end of bad, offensively vapid, or just dizzying mainstream films in which the general state of fragmentation would have to be called extreme, from Babylon (2022) to Kinds of Kindness (2024) and even doubtlessly Emilia Pérez (2024), the work on display in Eureka is grounded, controlled, and everywhere evidence of an adept hand. It's a question I would imagine James Joyce asking: how does one use language to articulate for and of the jungle? The adept replies: it depends. Jacques Rivette, our perennial saint, seems to forever have the cleanest and most decisive cinematic hand when it comes to turning one soil, one nation, one city, one room, one girl, infinitesimally downward and inward, each little compartment, into its own fanciful and bustling space-time.