Walk and Talk With Me

If it's all so fucking futile, what the fuck are you so fucking upset about, fuckhead?
- Eric Bogosian, SubUrbia 

The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010)

Steve Jobs (Danny Boyle, 2015)

Molly's Game (Aaron Sorkin, 2017)

Hasil Adkins, "Walk and Talk With Me"

Three Superlative Beatles Covers [in Chronological Order]

 

The Supremes, "Can't Buy Me Love"

Ike & Tina Turner, "Get Back"

Bill Frisell, "Strawberry Fields Forever"

A Selfie and a Song and Then a Shelfie

 

Full grown, get down

I need a full grown woman

- Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, "Full Grown"

There is more. A lesbian travel agent in Saint Tropez has been questioned about her alleged intimacy with Madame Pompidou.

- Edward Chisholm, Murder in Paris '68: A True Story of Death and Glamour

Jon Spencer Blues Explosion & Dub Narcotic Sound System
"Fudgy the Whale"

* Both Charles de Gaulle and Dylan Thomas died on my birthday!

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.