A Sermon from Erlton

 

Today I have gathered you together, the anointed and the garlanded, in the hopes that God may not trespass against us, hoping to divine all those precious artifacts that we might carry with us like the ancient pharaohs to whatever awaits us on that others shore…the one pronounced and promised in the bluegrass music of old Kentucky. I am the sermonizer and I carry along with me nothing remotely resembling wrath. I am an imperfect man searching not for perfection but rather hoping against all odds to become better at being imperfect right here and right now because that’s all we got. In his sermon on the mount, God advises us through his embodied son to be more like the bird of the air and the lily of the field. The hereditarily doomed German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is saying the same thing when he advises us in near-desperation to prioritize ethology over ethics. When you don’t understand something just ask. What ethology means for Nietzsche is very close to what Deleuze and Guattari mean when they talk about becoming-animal, which is to say that ethology means natural creatural behaviour without subordination to higher human values but with survival and coexistence still in mind. “Freud described three great historical wounds to the primary narcissism of the self-centered human subject, who tries to hold panic at bay by the fantasy of human exceptionalism,” admonishes Donna Haraway. The three wounds are the Copernican wound, the Darwinian wound, and ultimately the Freudian one. The Jewish and Viennese Dr. Freud was not above a certain amount of equivocal self-laceration. In the 21st century, to look at what we’ve done to the earth and persist in believing in our exceptionalism is both monomaniacal and a crime.

The quickest way to reach God is to look within. You are made of the same subatomic building blocks as everything else. God and the devil are the same thing; sensorial life is polarized. To take care of yourself and look after your body is to fend off angels and demons. You don’t want angels and demons crawling flickeringly through your windows, believe you me. Tibetan Tulpa and Haitian Loa and the Great What-Have-You. Romantic Angelicate, Closed Circuit, Secret Gnosis of the Central Nervous System's Basic Operational Polarity. What is time? You’re too terrified to even really ask. Time is three cherries on all the slot machines at once and they suddenly blow their top, like in Twin Peaks: The Return. The owls are not what they seem. Little birds chirp in order to mock us; owls arrive with the full force of God-sanctioned death. Your are no more than an enabling formal vessel like a puppet and you do not yet have any idea what kind of damage can be done to you remotely. Memory orbits around itself and it is impossible not to get dizzy; you can only stand on two feet for so long. I plead with you not to let your relationship with God grow toxic. You do not want to become one of the malefactors of eternity. “You pushed forward even while pieces of you were falling away ravaged and bleeding,” writes Paul West, “and you did not bother signing your name to your life…” Indeed it is the person’s name, the proper noun itself, which prevents that person from apprehending the greater world.

The other shore is the contravening non-side of all theoretical sides that might be taken or adopted. A distorted consonance of sides and a constitutive differential of alliance. The side of Eve is the side of life. Death’s side is the pigpen, mortuary of mud and shit. The slow and stupefied suicide of the human race turns power into a verb and the earth into a rendering plant. There is a real divine mandate that is hopelessly obscure to us. Any triumph of livingness over death would have to strip this world of the sociopathic reign of the human individual. It is impossible for us now to imagine a utopia that isn’t despoiled from without or within. Let us pray. All clarity is a true clarity we would rather not possess. You are not made to meet it without suffering, your joints and sockets and their errant carpentry. All of the current models are horribly compromised, new models are needed. My humble advise is to sit in a pasture and read indefinitely.

Eric Dolphy, "Eclipse"

Elmore Leonard

 

Out of Sight (Steven Soderbergh, 1998)

Any bibliophile or bookworm out there is surely aware of the propensity of writers toward drink (occupational hazard). William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker. Parker once said that she didn’t keep notebooks because whenever she did keep one she’d invariably leave it behind in some bar or restaurant. It is also I hope commonly known that certain writers didn’t hit high gear until they got sober and more or less stayed that way. Popular favourites in this category include Raymond Carver and Barry Hannah. When Carver was teaching at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop alongside pioneering dipsomaniac realist John Cheever, the two of them were known to make a hellacious scene wherever they went together, and when he ultimately got sober Carver said that his whole life thereafter became gravy. His writing for sure improved and book sales appear to confirm that. Elmore Leonard might be the greatest of the publicly recovering alcoholic novelists if only because he remains the most widely read and the most fun. His trajectory is pretty charming: first he wrote westerns drunk and then he wrote crime novels primarily set in the city of Detroit whilst stone cold sober. If Leonard is a bit like the Charles Dickens of Detroit he is even more like Honoré de Balzac because he has a whole universe unto itself where characters reappear novel to novel and the urban situation overlaps itself for purposes of creative merriment. Notably, Michael Keaton plays the same character in both Jackie Brown—Quentin Tarantino’s brilliant 1997 adaptation of Rum Punch—and Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight from the following year, clearly yet another sly move on the part of the ever-canny Soderbergh. In Leonard’s novel Switch, the characters Ordell Robbie and Louis Gara reconvene; we met them in Rum Punch and they were played by Samuel L. Jackson and Robert De Niro respectively in Jackie Brown. Elmore Leonard, an ironist and a mischief-maker, definitely had fun writing. Character, milieu, dialogue, plotting: these, in a nutshell, are his forte. This is a writer in whose punchy vernacular to shoot someone with a shotgun is to “pump and bust him.” Trash culture, the sordid paperback or penny dreadful, tabloid titillation, pop art: yum, yes please. I don't know if Andy Warhol, producer of the movie Trash, was a Leonard fan, but, Christ, man, how could he not have been? The way to plot a page-turner is to keep the reader on the balls of they feet. Unknown Man No. 89 is an especially notable early Leonard crime yarn because of the sophistication of the plotting and because of its focus on alcoholism and recovery. This is also a darkly humorous novel not afraid to allow Virgil, a black underworld killer who wears a kind of stylish pimp stetson, to take a moment, breaking into a hotel room so as to steal all of a man’s papers and documents, to throw into the suitcase along with the designated spoils of the raid "a painting on the wall he liked of a cat out in a sailboat with the mast broken off and this terrible motherfucker storm coming at him. Virgil sat down and had his scotch and coke drink, wondering if the cat made it, then wondering where the cat had got the sailboat, if it was his or if he’d stolen it someplace and was trying to get away, shit, when the storm got him.” Bad guys up to bad business, but always this presiding, good-willed attention to the presiding human comedy, à la Balzac. This is the alchemist's gift of being able to make art of popular things. Elmore Leonard is also a more versatile writer than he is credited with being (doubtlessly on account of his best-selling popularity, equivalent to the adulterer’s branded A). Crime fiction usually functions and grabs us by presenting a kind of unobstructed heightened realism, as with writers as diverse as James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, and Patricia Highsmith. Leonard is more than merely adept respective of that particular mode. At the same time, you have something like 1980’s City Primeval, which is probably about as close as American fiction gets—this side of William S. Burroughs or Robert Coover—to Hieronymus Bosch. In point of fact, I subtly reference that berserker in the opening lines of the Shroud Shifter song “The Rocket”…  

Shroud Shifter, "The Rocket"

Motormouth Book Club: Fuzzy Peach Meridian

Unfortunately I was able; sadly, it was easy.
- William H. Gass, "The Master of Secret Revenges"

 

Next Up on the Docket

Hammett (Wim Wenders, 1982)

Henry & June (Philip Kaufman, 1990)

Naked Lunch (David Cronenberg, 1991)

Wonder Boys (Curtis Hanson, 2000)

Bright Star (Jane Campion, 2009)

"Karakkaze Yarō" 
Theme from the Movie Afraid to Die 
(Yasuzō Masumura, 1960)
Sung by Legendary Writer Yukio Mishima 

Sanctuary

 

Take the cotton
of the mind's doom-ridden chatter
out of your ears.
- Rumi

I miss friendship more than I miss sex. Rather, since I do not miss any particular actually existing friend, it is friendship in a more abstract or nebulous sense that I crave. There are people out there who lose the love of their life and do not subsequently love ever again. That isn’t my story. I stumbled through relationships like there was nothing at stake and my partners noticed. In the words of poet Marianne Moore: “the cure for loneliness is solitude.” In solitude we have the rich luck to commune with the heaving totalities. It’s the only actual way to do art. You need at the very least, like Virginia Woolf, a room of your own. “The measure in which your solitude is hard is the measure of the reward it offers,” writes Fenton Johnson in At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life. What did I do to receive this brute but noble gift? I became the person I was all along becoming. I could not have forced it, because I did not have any idea what I was doing. Did you? No supplementation is required and it is too stupid for words to outsource one's sense of worth to other people. Many days my recovery from addiction is almost entirely about dropping out of pulsed time so I can slow down and remember how to breathe like a creature. In a time that hovers I can attain my tenuous balance. In William T. Vollmann’s heartbreaking and intermittently brutal masterpiece The Lucky Star, the transwoman Judy, who has modelled herself after troubled superstar Judy Garland, but who does not pass and regularly feels like a freak, sees stardom and adulation as the only drugs that could possibly save a person like her. Romantic love has to be one kind of torment or another, and Judy has no shortage of proof. Humiliation is the cost of doing human exchange in any form heretofore known. “Just as the Wicked Witch of the West was the true friend who slipped Judy Garland her amphetamines on the set of The Wizard of Oz,” writes Vollmann, “it might fall out when Francine declined to play savior that Snake Goddess Shantelle supplied the other Judy with just the right happiness pills, thereby profiting not only in cash, but also in entertainment, because when the transwoman got high enough, whatever humiliations her loving public inflicted quickly slopped out of her consciousness, so that the fun could continue all night, in the spirit of children torturing a small animal for hours, careful not to let their victim escape into premature insensibility. To tell you the truth, this was more fun than Judy’s so-called act.” You court disaster when you face your public saturated in need and want, drugged so that you can handle the burn and the blowback. Neither Judy nor I ever figured out how to turn this infernal machine off so long as our public keeps looking at us with those prepossessing faces.

An Autobiographical Aside: Trauma and Hopelessness

 

Le jeune Ahmed (Jean Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2019)

On the first day of grade two at Woodlands Elementary school, the teacher Mrs. Templeton asked the class what we had gotten up to the previous summer. When it came to be my turn, I began to excitedly tell a longwinded story, which has always been among my favourite things to do. I had just started in with animated glee on a football game I had attended at McMahon Stadium, which has always been adjacent to Nick’s Steakhouse, which I thought was a really cool place, when out of nowhere Mrs. Templeton shut me down, moving on to the next student. This simply confirmed for me what I had already suspected: I was going to hate grade two as much as I’d hated grade one. Mrs. Templeton was a very large woman. Years later when I was working an office job downtown, a fun coworker of mine in her early thirties who had a Rottweiler and who I liked to hang out with told me that her boyfriend had gotten drunk one night and confessed that he used to pick up fat women so he could take them home and tit-fuck them. To each their own, I suppose. I never got the hang of being polite and ingratiating in the patented Canadian style. When I started drinking at the age of thirteen, I found that it numbed the pain, but it also made me giggle and talk even more. In high school, long before I was diagnosed with bipolar 1, I already realized that I was only able to be conventionally charming when I was depressed. Alcohol is a depressant, but it only makes you depressed unpredictably. An oldtimer in Alcoholics Anonymous once told me and a room full of my fellow alcoholics that the difference with being sick with alcoholism, which is a terminal condition if not treated, and being sick with cancer is that people sympathize with you when you have cancer. If you are an alcoholic they just think you are an asshole. Fair enough, I figured, I am very frequently an asshole. There was always a lot of trauma in my body and hopelessness in my soul. Put alcohol on top of that and it operates as an accelerant, liker gasoline on a fire. I was six-years-old when the Challenger disaster happened on live television and it traumatized me badly, largely because I had become a fan of Christa McAuliffe, the social studies teacher and non-astronaut who was sent along with the mission for public relations purposes. I am very glad that I did not know then what I found out the other day: the crew module survived the explosion and it is likely that everybody on board was alive for the nearly-three-minute plummet downward until they hit the water at terminal velocity. Even worse and more insane is the fact that originally they hadn't planned to send a charismatic civilian to teach lessons about space over video relays up there along with the professionals. They initially intended to send Sesame Street's Big Bird (the problem being that the eight-foot costume wouldn't fit in the module). If Big Bird had actually been in the Challenger when it exploded I simply would never have recovered. 

I was smoking too much cannabis for too long, starting approximately around the time I determined to set out to make my record Yevgenia, of which I still have a few hundred copies if you or your friends want one. I am legitimately still in cannabinoid withdrawal and last night I had a nightmare so intense it was more like sleep paralysis. I was basically asleep but I was desperately afraid somebody was going to break into the house and torture me for days. Suddenly I was driving down Elbow Drive south of Glenmore and flood waters were rapidly rising ahead of me so I had to turn the car around. In a flash I was in some ominous woods on foot then suddenly on my back with my feet shooting up in the air without my willing it or controlling it. I had the conscious thought that I might be dead and this might be the afterlife; I was absolutely humming with pure terror. Then I found myself at the door of a small house in the woods. There was a little handwritten note on the door that said, semi-legibly: what the fuck? I was too terrified to ring the bell or knock. I tried to say hello, but it came out as a barely audible wheeze. I woke with a start, shot out of bed, and said what the fuck? to nobody. Then I said: okay, I think I interpret this...if you are all alone by nature or design, however obnoxious and unbearable you may be, no matter how kind and considerate, then you are lost and have nobody. Please don't do that to me again...

Albert Ayler, "Bells," 1966

Things I Did Today

Only the Best Music Rocks My Casbah

Pookleberry Pie Goes to the Sinema

It was such a good and stimulating day that I had to come home and have an extended nap in the early evening. Now I’ll admit I dread a sleepless or at least turbulent night before my mother and I head to Drumheller tomorrow on family business. I had the Guadalajara omelette at Purple Perk, a personal favourite breakfast food indulgence, briefly hypnotized by the comely lady in yoga pants sitting, and periodically standing, directly in front of me. After that I drove north and attended my favourite weekly meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. It’s my favourite because there are lots of oldtimers there who know what they are talking about and who demonstrate each week without fail that it works if you work it. I’m not going to tell you what anybody said in the meeting because one of the central principles of these principle-rich twelve-step programs is: what happens in these rooms stays in these rooms. I think we can safely assume that this is the one thing David Foster Wallace forgot to jot down in that clandestine notebook of his when he was ‘researching’ Infinite Jest. You all presumably know that I’ve transgressed on this front myself, but in my defence I have for a good while believed that people in this day and age owe it to themselves and the general public to recover publicly, messily, and loud as all get-out. When I got home I consulted my blog and my YouTube channel to see how many people have hit up my latest posts, which made me sad, so I went and lay on the daybed in the phonograph room whilst spinning old-timey banjo music. When I had properly collected myself, I realized that the timing was perfect to go catch the second matinee of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Her Private Hell at the nearby mall. I not only liked this motion picture quite a bit, it’s definitely by far the best thing I’ve seen in the multiplex so far this year, not that that’s a huge achievement, God only knows. It played Cannes in May, but didn’t make the Official Competition, and it currently has a 42% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. (If you take Rotten Tomatoes seriously there can’t be any redeeming you #SorryNotSorry.) Though this new film is not quite so aggressively sickening as Only God Forgives (2013) or The Neon Demon (2016), you won’t have any trouble determining that this is the same director. It indisputably contains more ocular trauma than your average violent movie. It really is quite weird. You know what? It actually reminded me a little of the 2012 film adaptation of Cloud Atlas, which I have always argued is underrated. I also think that Winding Refn in certain set-pieces is paying conscious homage to the visual style of French director Bertrand Mandico, who is one year Winding Refn’s junior. I am pretty sure that Mandico’s 2016 short film Depressive Cop is one of the top ten short films of all time, surpassing all of David Lynch’s short films with the possible exception of Premonitions Following an Evil Deed from 1995. One peculiar and amusing creative decision in Her Private Hell was to appropriate the name Johnny Thunders in a manner analogous to how Harmony Korine appropriated Moondog in 2019’s The Beach Bum. I very much enjoyed watching Sophie Thatcher on screen with her crazy teeth and even thought at times that she was like a much less unhinged Paz de la Huerta. At any rate, surely now you can see why I needed that extended siesta! Some days life is just really, really fine and the gratitude slides on in easy as pie…

Top Ten Most Notable/Memorable Jobs I've Had; or, How to Keep Your Resume Short and Sweet [in Chronological Order]

 

Drugstore Cowboy (Gus Van Sant, 1989)

My ambition is handicapped by laziness.

- Charles Bukowski, Factotum

[In addition to the jobs listed below, I have worked in four bookstores (including the Chinook Centre Chapters during Christmastime).]

- Front desk clerk and liaison at gym specializing in personal training.

- Geological technician for small oil company (analyzing geological logs on microfiche, printing them, and splicing them on a draughtsman's table with an X-Acto knife and various adhesives).

- Production assistant for 'entertainment news' television program. 

- Part time marijuana trafficker for bikers (free weed and non-taxable cash, but eventually an underworld associate informed me that the bikers won't kill you for less than $3000, but they will kill you for $3000).  

- University teaching assistant.

- Warehouse sales representative for company selling movie posters and memorabilia online and over the phone.

- Accounts payable for midsized oil company (data entry and diplomacy with vendors).

- Client outreach for gigantic homeless shelter.

- Residential support worker for drug and alcohol treatment facility. 

- Board director and committee chair for a cinematheque (volunteer position). 

Juana Molina, "Cosoco" [Official Music Video]

* It was Shelf Life Books that made me decide that I will do whatever it takes to never have to work any goddamn day job ever again, so help me God.