Updated Cover Letter

 

It’s not that I’m indifferent to whether or not there’s still actively existing souls aside from the quantities more or less known tuning into the show and keeping updated on the fussed-over programming, absolute eternal backflip flapjack that it is and always aspired to be, but nothing changes the fact for me that, however you cut the deck or say your piece, I have to find stuff to do all day every damn day and from now on I am no longer the unflushed turd for middle management to pretend to ignore, Cuban heels clapping on the hardwood floor, because I have a right to my own oversight and the selection of tasks with proper allure and sense of worldly purpose. I make my own destiny, you tricked-out bingo dauber in shirt and shoes! I have had a hell of a time having any time at all and I’m no longer going in for room temperature folderol, fool me three times shame on the eavesdroppers and the switchboard operator too. Do me a favour and riddle me not. The coarseness in me will call you out publicly, exemplar that you are of the obscene recreational breeding that leads to mindless girls who never stop smirkily preening, imagining a sphere of influence no more substantial that something you might wrap distractedly around your index finger whilst gabbing supercilious into the spume of telecommunications. The French have to celebrate their ghastly revolution with all them miscellaneous Bastille Day blues and all that ornery folkloric street action because they were definitely saddled with that history and no other, but try getting them to address the matter of all the hideous public revolutionary mutilation, savage desecrations of the living and the dead, special relish and devotion saved for the disfigurement or removal of all or part of the genitalia. No revolution has ever been about the triumph of the just and/or the restoration of balance. All revolutions are about the comprehensive failure of the state apparatus and the crowd fanatically avenged, at its own pace. As I have gotten older, I have grown much more afraid of the crowd than I am of the state apparatus, not that I ever exactly greeted that seedy blockbusting kaiju monstrosity with open arms either. The picture of the American outsider in American western movies aided by grit, savoir faire, and moral intransigence in the face of graft, exploitation, conspiracies of silence, power politics, and fear, always appealed to me I think because I like and recognize the topography and am painted salmon pink to imagine myself concocting nifty means to trespass against it with halo and lariat, seeing myself in the earthy and mud-spattered mirror of Clint Eastwood’s high plains drifter, hearing myself in Will Hutchins’ rightfully famous line from Monte Hellman’s The Shooting: “I don't give a curly hair, yellow bear, double dog damn if ya did!” The loner itinerant outlaw walks a corkscrew path so good he’s practically Fred Astaire in top coat and tap shoes, picking the pockets of entire city blocks, swooping and leapfrogging. How you are to approach and enter the saloon given the current temper of things and recent upsets among the cattle barons, cutting close and coming around the side in the hopes of catching two or three of them blind. It is less that I do not wish to connect and form meaningful bonds with other people at this late date than it is a matter of the hand of destiny having set a table where I’m to be seated alone and gun shy and endlessly indulged by Charles Dickens Christmas ghosts. Join me and the Industrial Workers of the World in dumping the bosses off your backs. They don’t care about you any more than if they were maître d’hôtel in some swanky uptown joint, fake nice and real meanness. If you give it the proper amplitude, honey, it’s still fucking servitude. Never give a sucker an even break…and get me a grave plot next to W.C. Fields if it’s not too much of a bother. If I want to spend the rest of my life perfecting the art of writing long, winding sentences of both aesthetic and structural perfection in the manner of Henry James, laying it on thick as molasses and then finger-painting with the stuff, then by God that’s what I’m a-gonna do, riding side-saddle with my koala bear muse. The only limit on my ability to tell the cold sober truth out loud and at length is the capacity of my interlocutor to stand there and take it without folding like a deck chair. Scoot if I’m losing my patience with you. That’s my advise. It means I have something to say.   

Portrait of the Artist as Moo Goo Gai Pan

Satoko Fujii, "Inori"

Twenty-Five Unsung Cinematic Masterpieces About Young People [in Chronological Order]

Sweet Five Alive tidings, Hooo's Hooo at the Zooo, to play your wax paper kazoo to, chewin' on that kudzu... 

I worked for newspapers. I worked for newspapers at a time when I was not competent to do so. I reported inaccurately. I failed to get all the facts. I misspelled names. I garbled figures. I wasted copy paper. I pretended I knew things I did not know. I pretended to understand things beyond my understanding. I oversimplified. I was superior to things I was inferior to. I misinterpreted things that took place before me. I over- and underinterpreted what took place before me. I suppressed news the management wanted suppressed. I invented news the management wanted invented. I faked stories. I failed to discover the truth. I colored the truth with fancy. I had no respect for the truth. I failed to heed the adage, you shall know truth and the truth shall set you free.

- Donald Barthelme, "Brain Damage"  

The pool hall was important, especially on Sundays at noon, after church. I got kicked out of high school seventeen times.

- Nicholas Ray, I Was Interrupted  

Crazed Fruit (Kō Nakahira, 1956)

Black Peter (Miloš Forman, 1964)

Warrendale (Allan King, 1967) 🇨🇦

La chinoise (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)

Mes petites amoureuses (Jean Eustache, 1974)

The Traveler (Abbas Kiarostami, 1974)

The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (Nicolas Gessner, 1976) 🇨🇦

North Sea is Dead Sea (Hark Bohm, 1976)

Une vraie jeune fille (Catherine Breillat, 1976)

Passe ton bac d’abord... (Maurice Pialat, 1978) 

Over the Edge (Jonathan Kaplan, 1979)

Navajeros (Eloy de la Iglesia, 1980)

Made in Britain (Alan Clarke, 1983)

O.C. and Stiggs (Robert Altman, 1985)

Smooth Talk (Joyce Chopra, 1985)

De bruit et de fureur (Jean-Claude Brisseau, 1988)

Pump Up the Volume (Allan Moyle, 1990)

The White Balloon (Jafar Panahi, 1995)

Kitchen Party (Gary Burns, 1997) 🇨🇦

Nowhere (Gregg Araki, 1997)

Freeway II: Confessions of a Trick Baby (Matthew Bright, 1999)

Nobody Knows (Hirokazu Koreeda, 2004)

Detention (Joseph Kahn, 2017)

Jeanne (Bruno Dumont, 2019)

Medusa (Anita Rocha da Silveira, 2021)

Ramones, "Teenage Lobotomy" 

Hip Hop, Rap, and Gangster Rap: Shaking Your Ass in the Line of Fire

 

Dr. Dre

In the 1990s as a young person you couldn’t step into the arena of culture without hearing an awful lot of hip hop, rap, and gangster rap, which was mostly fine with me. Popular music interests me just in principle. When I listen to a shitty piece of manufactured pop music or force myself to shit through some hideous Hollywood atrocity, I am always gladdened that I’m compelled to take away at the very least insights of a sociological nature. The Japanese film director Takashi Miike once said that no movie is bad enough to make sitting in a movie theatre unpleasant. My relationship with gangster rap took an unusual turn when we moved out to the country southwest of town when I was thirteen and I quickly befriended a sixteen-year-old boy named Doug from down the way who had a driver’s licence and whose mother had a charming little llama farm. There was also the matter of his uncle’s ample video cassette porn collection. I was partial to the Seymore Butts series. Doug was not ultimately to graduate high school and his prospects cannot be considered to have been good, but he and his two best friends who were brothers were good running mates for a precocious kid marooned on the edge of civilization. These were the first boys with whom I was to ever get properly gooned on spirits. Doug only played gangster rap in his car and always said that since he was driving the passenger had to listen to whatever he the driver wanted to play, even his mother being subject to this arrangement, which struck me as crazy even though I made my mom listen to Megadeath and Slayer when I was a kid, sure she’d at least appreciate the virtuosity. Rap and gangster rap of the 90s vintage weren’t exactly my thing. I wanted Mudhoney’s guitar sound and to break shit on stage, but back from the beginning of things some rap had appealed to me in a real elemental sort of way, rife with fun performative advocacy and hilarious grandstanding, and it was especially Run-DMC and Public Enemy that I revered above all, notwithstanding the tug of alliances pulling me from metal and toward punk and dirty guitar rock, hip hop and rap figuring only parenthetically…theoretically. Doug was obsessed with N.W.A and all its various solo offshoots, et cetera. He loved playing the Ice Cube solo albums more than anything, all of which I found turgid and drab, but I liked Eazy-E’s more wildly performative stuff and really, really love Dr. Dre’s post-L.A.-riots community-building project The Chronic, which I suppose you could say even allowed Doug and I to properly bond a little and which does the exact thing party music is supposed to—ergo, it makes you shake your ass—while at the same time more or less introducing the world to Snoop Dogg of Long Beach, California, who writes pretty stupid rhymes but who nonetheless has the most mellifluous West Coast flow ever caught on magnetic analogue tape. If you give too many gifts to an iconoclast then, sucker, that’s your ass. Those anointed celestial walk a narrow margin through the yarrow and the margarine. Just like Snoop Dogg of Long Beach, California, elbow-deep in a suntanned jar of Orange County honey, we are what we are and is what we is and the reason we don’t trade it in for better is ‘cause we’re afraid of what worse shit we’ll get. Fuck all y’all. Peace. 

American Gangster (Ridley Scott, 2007)

Dr. Dre, "Let Me Ride" [Official Video]

Jazz and Improv Duos: Discount Tuesday Playlist

 

Edmonton, 2018

Steve Lacy and Mal Waldron, "Evidence"

Anarcho-syndicalist 

COVID Outreach Worker

Exquisite Corpse

He wanted to see the girl again. Maybe for the last time, he thought. But he had thought that before, and no time before had been the last time.

- Patricia Highsmith, The Cry of the Owl

If your mind has vanished so much as to render you unaware of its loss, you had better stop clutching at what has already been taken away from you.

- Paul West, A Stroke of Genius: Illness and Self-Discovery 

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Vienna, 2021

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Alice Coltrane, Journey in Satchidananda [Full Album]

Monster, 2021

 

...

Lugano, Switzerland

In the spring of 1995 when I was fifteen years old my parents had the school extend the spring breaks of my sister and I and the whole family went off on a long and highly stimulating road trip through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, plus one night in Strasbourg and a quick leisurely pass through Liechtenstein. It is easy to remember that this was the spring of 1995 because when we got back to the hotel in Frankfurt where we'd started, right at the end of our trip, all the newspapers were screaming in self-explanatory German about the Oklahoma City federal building bombing. Every couple years I have a situating historical landmark like that. On one long day of driving I managed to read the entirely of The Catcher in the Rye and then the first third-or-so of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. The most captivating and magnetic place I visited that trip was Lugano, Switzerland—see one of the photos I took immediately below—which feels an awful lot like somebody transplanted a piece of the French Riviera into the Swiss mountains employing little else save brute strength and counterintuitive logic. I felt that place like warm light in my bones and circulating in my blood.

Lugano played an important role in the personal and intellectual development of Friedrich Nietzsche, who loved the Swiss mountain-and-lake regions very much. Lugano is where Nietzsche's complicated romantic pursuit of author, psychoanalyst, and boy-crazy globetrotter Lou Salomé came to a head and dropped him in his own tracks. 1882, Salomé, along with Nietzsche and writer Paul Rée, visited the area surrounding Lake Lugano. While staying there, Nietzsche and Salomé went on long mountain hikes and kept close quarters. According to historical accounts from those who knew both it was during these mountain excursions that Nietzsche's obsession with Salomé deepened and he is generally believed to have made a failed marriage proposal, a major turning point in his turbulent life and definitely not a good one. Even if you try to be optimistic and generous, all of the turning points in Nietzsche's life look pretty dismal.

Lou Salomé (with whip), Paul Rée, Friedrich Nietzsche

German-born Nobel Prize winner and grand literary mystic Hermann Hesse lived in Montagnola, on the hills above Lugano, for over forty years. Steppenwolf and Siddhartha were written there. You'd think the unshaven and the unkept would be heading there in pilgrimages like Chaucer's. Point-to-point communication, mountain-to-mountain. You shan't get a new diskette if you cannot practice your etiquette. Argentinean grand literary mystic Jorge Luis Borges ended up with his family in Lugano happenstantially, immediately subsequent to the First World War, when he was still only eighteen. After the death of Borges’s maternal grandmother in 1919, the family left Geneva and chose to settle in Lugano because it was beautiful, relatively inexpensive, peaceful (off the beaten track), and it wasn't going through the protracted sanitation and public health nightmare all the major European cities seemed to be sharing in immediately after the war and its disposable human millions. For reasons not at all different from Hesse and the Borges clan, Mikhail Bakunin, bold Russian revolutionary and godfather of anarchism, retired to Lugano...for about a year...and then died the year after that. He went for the peace and the beauty. He'd more or less just turned sixty. When you get to be about sixty the expectation is that you start conducting your revolutions with pen rather than with brick. Don't stress. I find one quickly gets the knack.  

Lake Lugano, 1945/46, Christoph Traugott