The Misfits

 

Insignificance (Nicholas Roeg, 1985)

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. Obliviously 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 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?    

The Misfits (John Huston, 1961)

Nico, "Janitor of Lunacy"

Jim O'Rourke, Insignificance [Full Album]

European Free Jazz Heyday

 

I'm interested in finding the genuine source of life in myself and the genuine source of music. I think those two consideration are tied up very much. I have certain spiritual beliefs about human beings, and the best place to find these sources of music are to look into the yoga and Zen teachings.

- John Tchicai

Evan Parker, Saxophone Solos [1975]

Peter Brötzmann, "Alarm 1" [Live, 1986]

Emmylou in Blue

 

Two Standout LPs from My Birth Year

Emmylou Harris, "Hickory Wind"

A Separate Blue

 

Taking in more and shutting out less. That was the mandate for Blue. Because trouble soon arrived wherever Blue had carved out a modest little bit of space to occupy, it had become rare to be a ‘body at rest,’ and some standby onlookers were secretly realizing they were starting to feel that way themselves…robbed of rest. Alas, to lean inward led to unaired grievances ungainly of aspect and to lean out meant you were at risk of a physical accident or ritualistic social humiliation. The mandate is to take in more information so that morbid interiority won’t swallow you whole. Can’t hurt to keep your hands fairly busy at various tasks. Drink of the Pool of Memory and not that of Forgetfulness. Blue would rather identify with rather than put an identity to. Identification is an activity of the generous imagination. Did you know that birds are up there in the trees and on the eavestroughs and fence posts mercilessly heckling all of life?

If your criticism of Blue begins with the words who the hell in their right mind?…you can go ahead and stop yourself right there. What kind of right mind do we think we’re talking about anyway? Excuse my mind, please, something isn’t right with it. I think I can see what the problem is here. These are the plain results of standardized testing. The mind is its own topography and also a circuit board. You try not to spill anything caustic on the console. That is the first rule. You also need to understand that on a daily basis any individual mind releases at least twice as much methane gas as a full-sized adult cow. Whenever there is a situation in which two tough guys in similar suits who look like they could sort of be related come in and start roughing up some cowering underworld geek…Blue always thinks of Kafka. Forever the blushing bride if you slide a little something extra on the side. A short poem about the hulking machines that clean the city streets in the early hours. These are the hours when Blue is most active at the typewriter, practically chain-smoking Camels. Do not be despondent if you wear the green Nehru jacket of the urban vagabond. Writhe not in anguish and abandon ye who are in no immediate peril. Death arrives at the loping pace of an overextended plague doctor robbed of rest. In the hustle and bustle of the stimulated mind, caffeinated for good measure, binary logic is reduced to dancing atoms in freefall. Excited and mobbed, Blue will canalize the district as a virtuality. The mind, having arrived on time, locks down its load and has itself a gander. The collectivized mind is the citizenry of this outpost and the individual mind an intercept. Blue walks the unknown streets of some new city until they are known.

 

Stopping at the Starbucks drive-thru for breakfast because running a little late for work, a person waiting in their automobile to retrieve that breakfast might begin to feel outright hounded by the clock. There is nothing quite so chilling to Blue as the barking of attack dogs. The web of communications must be a net that catches us, Blue presumes, because in some obliterated urban jungle with no electricity or running water…very few could be expected to find their footing. The rat is the patron saint of infrastructure, chewing its way through. Ask not for whom the cat lady tolls, the cat lady tolls for thee. People meet and fall in love like two shopping carts colliding. If the lovers have chemistry, they’ll know it first. As though it were all a board game in Isaac Newton’s Imaginarium. Blue wants the full spectrum of colours from the squatting position and all the birds chortling their commentary. It would be obscene to block off day from night and sleep in cycles. 

Do we even actually know exactly what it is we have gotten ourselves into? There are no smooth contours to attract the attention of our touch. The prismatic mindscape runs the gamut of colours. When we lean into the horizon with our base suspicions…can we expect any result except one even worse than we’d originally expected? To properly ponder and sit a smidgeon longer. For Blue, danger is what you get when you provoke the tempest. On earth everything is at sea, so the speak, and that’s where the trouble lurks. Those who rush about with too much insistency shall be carried off by strong winds. Poseidon. Blue is aware of the difficulties the situation continues to face, behind enemy lines with a bad map. Why do espresso and cigarettes—both stimulants—steady the nerves taken in moderation? It’s one of life’s mysteries. Robotic chatter fills the air. The hollow where you’ve stored your most cherished memories is the first one they ransack. Trilingual girl ups the ante. Blue is not likely to sit up all night with you so that you can get caught up, however many languages you may fluently speak. The only real adventures are misadventure. You cannot keep pacing the chiaroscuro-lit docks your whole life. The only mercy the divinity ever handed us was but a few feet of slack. Blue is the blue of horseshoes or cracked safes…nothing need be added to self-modifying nature. 

At the bottom of a mineshaft in the far north lies an emerald heart. There won’t be any chance left us to plead our cases once the vines start creeping in. Compensatory sense activities waylay our fears and citizens are encouraged to overcompensate. Confucius believed that we should hold loyalty to the world, principles, and others above all other considerations in terms of the consideration of an ethics. Everything would seem to hinge on Blue getting to the point. Who doesn’t find themselves feeling the effects of zero gravity now and then? Don’t you know that critters produce litters? When you find yourself on the offence…try to buy yourself some room to maneuver. 

An altercation between two actual people is always a sloppy, embarrassing mess. Did we ever know what precisely to do with our physical selves? What did we ever do to be forced to coincide with ourselves? Once upon a time, there was an empty courtyard at night. Blue likes it when it gets a little colder because there are no more flies to get in. A cigarette and a mug of black tea…now we can begin. What Blue is trying to bring across is that we can be stronger together as opposed to separate. It’s like that whole Pool of Memory and Pool of Forgetfulness routine. You commit to a choice as to which thing you are going to drink out of…in that moment. Do we have to throw down? Does it have to go down? This would appear to be a good moment to shut up and slow down. 

A short poem about the sound of an audience emptying the auditorium at the close of a performance…

Pauline Oliveros, The Well

Tempter

Ever since I first heard it, Refried Ectoplasm [Switched On Volume 2], a collection of singles and rarities by Stereolab, has been my favourite album by that band. On all their many great recordings of space station lounge English/French rock ’n’ roll jammers, Stereolab routinely cover that terrain like no other or others before or since. Highlights from Refried Ectoplasm include “Harmonium,” “French Disko,” and “John Cage Bubblegum,” but the big, stunning showstopper is “Tempter,” the closing track. I think it is the best song in the whole of the Stereolob repertoire. In season four of Better Call Saul the powers that be decided to use “Tempter” in an episode called “Coushatta.” I don’t think I watched Better Call Saul as far as season four, but that’s pretty cool all the same!    

Stereolab, "Tempter"

Five Great 21st Century Punk Records [in Chronological Order]

 

Punk rock music almost universally involves about three chords and rapid repetition. It’s the musical genre that taught me for good that uptempo music is the most fun kind, great for parties and dances. Since it is only working with a few chords and conducting its basic business around cascading riffs, punk rock wants to be loud, visceral, and ever on the verge of ecstatic collapse. The personal imprint of the individual players becomes important and noticeable. For the guitarists and bassists, sometimes even better results can be achieved with an amplifier that has been damaged in some way. 

Without further ado...

Bassholes, Bassholes, 2005

The Intelligence, Deuteronomy, 2007

King Khan and the Shrines, The Supreme Genius of King Khan and the Shrines, 2008

Iceage, You’re Nothing, 2013

Tyvek, Origin of What, 2016

The Intelligence, "Block of Ice" 
[Osees cover]

King Khan & the Shrines, "Land of the Freak" 
[Official video]

Iceage, "Morals" 
[Live from a studio in Copenhagen]

Alexander

 

Bob le flambeur (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1956)

The Criminal (Joseph Losey, 1960)

My name is Alexander Andreevich Alexandrov and I am, like my father before me, a confirmed sinner. This is hardly merely a matter of a shared ardour for vodka, though that is assuredly part of it. I’m a good guy and I’m a bad guy, but the face of evil I am not. I think my father believed that the balance of power was always somehow, somewhere out of whack. He grew cockeyed and dyspeptic. My sinful expenditures, usually fully conscious, are related to confidence connivances in which I artfully fleece everyday people of their hard-earned money and also a tendency to get habitually drunk, surly, and avoidant in my relationships with women, who are sometimes with some justification referred to as the fairer sex, these in my case tending to consist of exotic dancers, low-rent fashion models, and weary, crooked realtors or lawyers of sturdy stock. The case I want to make at the outset relates to the God of the Big Three Monotheisms. What monotheisms, you ask? Judaism, the Big Daddy, which began over three thousand years ago; Christianity, which began with rebellious itinerant Jews in Judea in the 1rst century CE (obviously); and good ol’ fanatical Islam, which began around 610 CE in Arabia after the Prophet Muhammad had visions and started telling folks about them. What we know about the God of the Big Three Monotheisms is  that He in His wily Omnipotence has a wild sense of humour while at the same time being a confirmed sadist of great vehemence  Which is to say: God is a good guy and a bad guy. This God does not hate sinners—the Christian version especially!—he hates evil (corporations, governments…serial killers), but at the same time He must to some extent sort of at least passively enjoy evil as a spectator sport—in His Omnipotence—or else how come He hasn’t vanquished it yet? I believe we can largely chalk it up to a strain of divine sadism.

Most of what I do for money is inherently criminal and touch-and-go, but I have always liked to team up for easy no-fuss jobs with lawyers, especially lady lawyers. What most people maybe don’t know or just casually forget is that lawyers act as intermediaries between power brokers from different strata of public life. They hear an awful lot and work at a cool veneer, intent to keep transactions active and ongoing. Even when everything is falling apart in front of you, you need to look like you know what you’re doing.    

Trudy is a certified attorney-at-law. Trudy is not her real name and she is from some hazy distant place that ain’t none of your business. I met her at a card table and she’s the kind of person who takes endless passing amusement at odd little details. I enjoy her recounting of any number of odd details; she’s good company and she’s savvy. Believe it or not, last night in my small apartment with the electrical air conditioner, Trudy said she’d been thinking of odd things pertaining to the Roman God Mercury. Not only was Mercury the God of commerce, eloquence, epistolary letters, travellers, sleight of hand, and thieves, she argued, he was also the God of the 24/7, unstinting flow of electronic capital and of network glitches too. I was in several senses compelled by this idea. I immediately had a picture in my imagination of the Milky Way Galaxy with all kinds of money flying around at the speed of light and small amounts of it disappearing now and then into obscured parcels of negative space. To Trudy I simply observed that the path from point A to point B hasn’t ever been straight. Maybe a letter gets intercepted, maybe your whole battalion does. On the way to the concrete realization of an idea we face the obstructions inherent to the idea itself. In trying to sell an idea to some other party—as though ourselves convinced—we face the basic roadblock of human communication. Travellers can find themselves in a predicament very quickly. People focus on the task and the goal, and their pockets are hanging there for the picking. 

Sometimes when I’ve had a good bit more to drink than could be considered reasonable and am therefore sloppy of demeanour, it is actually easier to run a sleight of hand trick on bar staff, like getting change back for a larger bill than I end up slipping them, because they simply are not expecting such hijinks from somebody in as unseemly a state as myself. It sounds simple and it is: sometimes the best way to avoid being noticed is to look like someone from whom your average person would be likely to avert their eyes. That’s right, just keep moving along. If you want to skim a little something extra off the surface it'll help if there isn’t anybody really looking. I guess it is toxic pride that makes me want to outsmart people, but deeper down within my fundamental character runs an enthusiast’s penchant for amateur playacting. Sometimes we amateur players can be reckless by nature or momentary inspiration, but it is always best to keep to those jobs you know you’ve got licked. It’s how one butters one’s bread.

In response to my recent musings on the liaison role played by attorneys, above board or not so much, Trudy pointed me to a quote from crime novelist and grift maven Jim Thompson’s autobiographical novel Bad Boy, which I confess I have not as yet had the opportunity to read in its entirety. Quoting at some length: “It was the bellboy who was always in closest contact with this hurly-burly world, a world always populated by strangers of unknown background and unpredictable behaviour. Alone and on his own, with no one to turn to for advice or help, he had to please and appease those strangers: the eccentric, the belligerent, the morbidly depressed. He had to spot the potential suicide and soothe the fighting drunk and satisfy the whims of those who were determined not to be satisfied. And always, no matter how he felt, he had to do those things swiftly and unobtrusively.” Jim Thompson was a hardcore drunk with lifelong emotional instability issues, often unproductive for long periods, but notably in 1953 and 1954 he published twelve of his best novels, a run the likes of which tawdry, angry, and cerebral paperback genre fiction won’t ever see again, you can count on that. If you pulled something like that in Vegas you’d be set for at least one lifetime. You would probably also be so stymied by righteous awe that you’d be too afraid to ever gamble again. As an old man Jim Thompson could mostly be found holding court at the legendary Musso & Frank on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles. He can also be seen as the cuckolded older husband in the 1975 film version of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely starring Robert Mitchum.

I have never been one to engage in violent crime, I am not myself especially sadistic, but I’ll break up a fight if I have to. I don’t want to confront a living thing in pain. I went hunting with my father once and it was more than enough. The science fiction writer Isaac Asimov famously wrote that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. He wrote that not too terribly long before Jim Thompson had his otherworldly run. That aphorism speaks loud and clear through the fog and blarney, requiring no fluff or finessing. The world is forever kneecapped by lobbyists acting on behalf of the munitions industry. When the American military blows off a whole hell of a lot of ordinance in some foreign land for no real tactical or strategic reason, just as a blind show of force, they call it a million dollar minute. Hardy har har. I couldn’t spend a million in a minute if I had a team of professionals at the ready. My grandparents fled atrocities and there is no end to my contempt for atrocities. Sometimes I think everyday life is an atrocity, but when I sober up I remember that this sort of thinking stems from self-pity, which nobody I’d want anything to do with finds attractive. I know I don’t. I never had to flee anywhere in a panic when it wasn’t my own fault. Once the bombardment starts you duck and cover, and that’s about the size of it. It might not be fair but if it’s real you have to deal with it anyway.

Earlier this evening Trudy and I were watching a 1080p porno clip on the Samsung LCD television in the bedroom. It featured three young women and a Slavic-looking guy posing in the role of lucky photographer. They shot it well and it was basically tasteful. At some point I realized that the three young women and the Slavic-looking guy all resembled different people I had known over the years, stretching back a long ways. I felt old in that moment. I think I see why those who have died briefly or come glancingly close report seeing their lives flash before their eyes. It’s like a backed-up drain. We are each of us for our contracted time in this baffling, plein air purgatory positively inundated with life.

Joseph Vitarelli, The Last Seduction [Film Score]

Farewell, My Lovely (Dick Richards, 1975)

* Jazz connoisseurs will note that in his wonderful and a propos score for The Last Seduction, a film in which Linda Fiorentino gives one of the strongest and most self-possessed performances I've ever seen anywhere, Joseph Vitarelli takes a good deal of direct inspiration from Miles Davis. You can go ahead and throw on Kind of Blue if you remain doubtful.