The Polio Vaccine

 

François Boucher, Resting Girl, 1752 

When I was a young Turk talking endless pretentious shit over pints of lager and pursuing only the lankiest young ladies, long of leg and fundamentally amoral in constitution, I said I didn’t ever want to be married because the whole institution of marriage was an anachronistic relic left over from feudalism. It should basically go without saying that I also didn’t want to have children. When people say to me that it is unethical to bring children into this world because it is a cruel place that we’ve just about completely ruined, I still have to agree with them in theory, but for whatever reason in my early forties I started to sort of obsess about perhaps having missed my opportunity to sire offspring, the passing on of my genetic information probably the only vehicle for provisional immortality available to me at this point. I started dating a younger actress I met on the set of a small indie film in Toronto for which I was director of photography and at the time I was conscious of selecting her by virtue of her being in possession of working reproductive equipment. Alas, at the end of shoot she went to Milan and I went to Vancouver. Not a month later we were all in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and then a protracted lockdown that I had to suffer in solitude and which rattled me more than I was able I think to apprehend at the time.  

It gradually became apparent to me during lockdown, the entirety of which I spent in my small condo in Olympic Village, that I was becoming more disordered in my thinking and that the space I inhabited gradually grew to reflect this. Normally I am a fastidious and orderly person to the extent that people sometimes comment upon it outright, sometimes even assuming erroneously that I’m homosexual. I also grew bitter with people in my life, more or less ceasing to communicate with family or any of my old friends, building grievances in my mind that I can see now did not have a whole lot of legitimacy. The exception was a pair of former colleagues in the film industry who regularly sent me screeners of recent international films. I watched movies daily, and it is to this small felicity that I attribute whatever sanity I was able to retain through this minor ordeal that I suppose I could not help but blow up into something bigger than it needed to be. Whenever I thought about women with whom I’d been in longterm relationships or who I’d believed I loved, it struck me that all of them had left once they got bored and that they’d only ever appreciated me in the first place because I was above average in the looks department and was a capable professional who projected confidence.

Though this wasn’t like me at all, my having no track record of this sort of thing, really, once lockdown measures finally relaxed a little the first thing I did was start looking up sex workers online. Naturally, I’d been vaccinated in compliance with the protocols. It was a kind of peculiar mania rather than routine horniness. Eventually I settled on a young, curvaceous woman going by the name of Autumn. She was a brunette, which was basically the only prerequisite from my standpoint, and she did out calls. I wasn’t about to go to some strange place. It may sound silly, but looking back I realize that I was still thinking about the possibly of becoming a father and desperately wanted to confirm that my own equipment was still up to par. I sent Autumn a text and she called me back on my cell rather quickly. She said she charged $300.00 for an hour, cash upfront, and that she could see me in an hour-and-a-half. I asked her if she would supply the condom and she said of course. At a good brisk pace, I walked to the convenience store down the street and took $500.00 out of the ATM.

When I met Autumn at the front doors to my building she looked up at me with surprise. I assumed it was just because I’m a good deal taller than the average guy. She was absolutely lovely. I had placed the $500.00 on the counter in my kitchen and when we got to my unit I gave her a little space so she’d feel secure and told her, pointing toward the money, that there was the agreed-upon $300.00 plus a $200.00 tip, but that I wasn’t expecting anything unusual or especially kinky. She gave me a somewhat circumspect grin. Then I invited her over to the couch for a quick chat before we proceeded with things. I asked her what she was passionate about and she immediately said horses. It turns out that her main hobby was dressage. She knocked me aback a little when she told me that she was about to start medical school and that she had not gotten the COVID vaccine largely because she has a tendency to react perversely to being told what to do, and because for the vaccine to work at all effectively they only had to give it to a large part of the population, not literally everybody. I asked her if she’d seen clients during the lockdown and she said far fewer than normal, primarily because most of the guys seemed to have  become squirrely and frightening. At this point something sort of odd happened. Autumn began talking about the polio vaccine. Vaccination works by conditioning the immune system with an immunogen. The development of immunity to polio efficiently blocks person-to-person transmission of polio virus, protecting individual vaccine recipients as well as the wider community. The development of two polio vaccines led to the first modern mass inoculations. The first effective polio vaccine was developed in 1952 by Jonas Salk and a team at the University of Pittsburgh. In April 1955, after mass polio vaccination began in the United States, the Surgeon General began to receive reports of patients who’d contracted paralytic polio shortly after being vaccinated with the Salk polio vaccine—from the Cutter pharmaceutical company—with the paralysis starting in the limb into which the vaccine was injected.

When we got to the bedroom she ordered me to get naked and lie on the bed, sort of in the manner of a strict school teacher sick of your shit. I complied. First she stimulated with her hands and then orally. She affixed the condom to my erect member and asked if there was a position I’d prefer. I said I’d like to try cowgirl, so she got up on top of me and went to work. Before too long it became clear that she was a little annoyed that I had not yet ejaculated. Probably most guys go off in thirty seconds. Her cellphone was beside her on the bed and at a certain point she began to pick it up intermittently and even to shoot off quick texts. It didn’t bother me much because I figured she was merely reassuring her pimp or security detail as to her safety. And fuck it, right? I’ll last as long as I last, I figured. I paid for my hour and then some. Eventually she stopped scowling and began to chuckle a little to herself. After I finally managed to ejaculate, she asked me if I ever do threesomes. She took the condom with her to the bathroom directly adjoining the bedroom and while she was in there I could actually hear her laughing.  

Duke Ellington, "Autumn Serenade," 1945

Top Ten Classical Blues Guitarists of the Early Recording Era

 

Mississippi Fred McDowell

Charlie Patton

Robert Johnson

Mississippi John Hurt

Furry Lewis

Bukka White

Blind Lemon Jefferson

Blind Willie McTell

Son House

Sleepy John Estes

Furry Lewis and Bukka White,  St. Louis 1973

* Essentially, by 'early recording era' we mean the 1920s and 1930s. 

Weird Bach: Fashion Icon

 

I am wearing a shirt from R2 Amsterdam and the pants are A Fish Named Fred (no joke, Google it). I made one of my regular trips to the Chinook Centre shopping mall for New York Fries poutine and a Score Blizzard from Dairy Queen. It remains my firm conviction that the Chinook Centre food court is the best place for 'people watching' in all of Western Canada. I mean...if you like your 'people watching' good and greasy...

Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, "Ice Cream for Crow" [Official Video]

On Anarchism

 

Peter Kropotkin

Emma Goldman

Gleaning a few grains of influence from Hilda Hilst, that great and towering Brazilian madwoman of letters, I would like to begin by asking rhetorically whether a dog—any given dog—is a happy, slobbery, gadabout anarchist. A dog doesn’t have much need for entrenched order because a dog shows up amenable and almost excessively prepared in all earnestness for whatever mess or revelry immediately awaits. A dog doesn’t bother thinking life too far beyond how life innately presents. If anarchism is first of all a methodology or ontology or even a metaphysics, it can only ever be tangled up in ideology secondarily. If it has to have an ideology, anarchism invariably ends up twinning itself with grassroots socialism, this business primarily being one of collectivized labour and equitable distribution of profits. The smaller your population the easier this is going to be to manage and administrate. The Mennonites and the Hutterites have probably done as good a job as any, though I guess some hippies of the drop-out ethos made a go of more or less operational communes here and there, learning to fix tractors and grow whatever they could eat and/or sell. This was back when the Age of Aquarius was coming but didn’t. The chronologically second of the two great Russian forefathers of modern anarchism after Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin is widely quoted as having said something in Russian along the lines of: “Competition is the law of the jungle, but cooperation is the law of civilization.” This is how us anarchist folk believe human society ought to function. However, it really should be clear to everybody that, just like the Age of Aquarius, civilization still hasn’t arrived.

Kropotkin was a descendent of aristocrats and he believed in decentralization, self-governing communities, and worker-run enterprises…just like contemporary Canadian activist author Naomi Klein (she of No Logo renown). The exiled and formerly-imprisoned Kropotkin went back to Russia after the October Revolution of 1917 and when he watched Lenin and his Bolshevik cronies build a clumsy top-down version of state-controlled capitalism under the pretence of later inaugurating a “dictatorship of the proletariat” that everybody including Leon Trotsky knew was horseshit, he actually became depressed and hopeless rather than disgusted or incensed. The October Revolution itself had been pure anarchy, but what happened afterward was nothing short of a historic catastrophe from which the world is still reeling. In his wonderful and disorienting book October: The Story of the Russian Revolution, author China Miéville attributes to the emergent technology of trains the collapse of the Czarist regime and the outrageous bedlam that followed. Though some anarchist revolutionaries were briefly held in high regard—like Iosif Bleikhman, “a fiery, unkempt, charismatic figure who spoke his native Russian with what Trotsky described as a ‘Jewish-American accent’ which his audiences enjoyed”—the vast majority of anarchists who participated in the October Revolution ended up dead, imprisoned, or in exile. There would appear to be a very harsh lesson here: only the skeeziest bottom-feeders ever seem to possess that special yen for seizing power.

This infernal revolution of October 1917 did not just pop off like a flashbulb out of nowhere. Radical politics had been building and covertly circulating in Czarist Russia for a good century beforehand, and Russia is indeed a very special case in this respect. Anybody who knows about the life of Fyodor Dostoevsky knows that he came traumatically close to being executed by firing squad for his involvement with subversive organizations. In the 1830s and 1840s, Ivan Turgenev, who shares my birthday, belonged to the same intellectual circles as future radical icons like Mikhail Bakunin and Vissarion Belinsky, and he would later address the drama and danger of the underground revolutionary existence in his elegant but extremely daring 1877 novel Virgin Soil, available to English readers in a wonderful translation from New York Review Books. Even the lion of Russian literature, Leo Tolstoy, practiced a form of Christian Anarchism, refusing to participate in state institutions—courts, the military, even taxation—leaving behind the legacy of a vast agrarian communal system to bind his followers and devotees in Christ.

Adapting and running with an old theme prevalent in the counterculture of the late 1960s, Canadian ‘green architect’ Jason F. McLennan writes that “the way to subvert the dominant paradigm is to have more fun than they do and make sure they know it.” Whether McLennan knows it or not—I’m guessing he does—he is also echoing supreme anarchist exemplar Emma Goldman who purportedly insisted in the early 1930s: “If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.” The subversion of the dominant paradigm has so far in history meant that whatever power apparatus is next on the docket will likewise have to be robustly subverted. If you cannot take pleasure in your work and your sabotage, or in your fellows and your comrades, then the mischief you believe you are up to cannot possibly be worthy of the energy and effort it taxes. “Every society,” writes Goldman, “has the criminals it deserves.”  

The Nabokov Problem

 

Lolita (Stanley Kubrick, 1962)

A Place in the Sun (George Stevens, 1951)

If you were to ask me which of Vladimir Nabokov’s novels is his best, the likelihood is that I would begin by providing myself a bit of a buffer, prefacing my remarks by saying that Ada, or Ardor is the most accomplished from the standpoint of literary prosecraft as well as being the most moving and most personal to this great and super unusual Russian aristocrat author in exile. Dig? I think you can see where this is going. The intractable problem here is that Nabokov’s actual greatest novel is indisputably Lolita. For ever and ever, Lolita has predictably arrived in paperback form with a blurb on the back or front surreptitiously attributed to Vanity Fair: “the only convincing love story of our century.” Since the century in question is the one that brought us the Holocaust and television, we might be prepared to take that dubious line with a grain of salt. As Vanity Fair has no mouth with which to speak or hands with which to write/type, the onus is on us to dig a little deeper and reveal the true author of the blurb, who turns out to be the usually very fine writer Gregor von Rezzori, among the most distinguished offspring of the dead-and-gone Austro-Hungarian Empire (he could probably relate more than a little to Nabokov on a personal level). Alas, unfortunately for all of us, von Rezzori had a little more to say: “a deeply touching story of unfulfillable longing, of suffering through love, love of such ardor that though it concentrated on its subject monomaniacally, it actually aimed beyond it, until it flowed back into the great Eros that had called it into being.” I actually have no idea what the fuck he’s talking about. The only thing this novel flows back into is the bubble of blood in the mouth of a dying fiend. Nabokov himself said that the novel was about the “cheerful barbarism” of America and for me as a reader it is very obviously his only unambiguous crime novel. I mean, Jim Thompson must have been hella jealous. If it is no longer fresh in your mind, let me rehash the story for you: a criminal European pervert with a dodgy superiority complex inveigles himself into the life of a dowdy adult American woman and develops a fixation on her daughter, twelve years of age when introduced, who the European characterizes as a “nymphette” but who is also the most vulgar and ill-mannered character in the whole novel, then he kidnaps her and takes her on the road where before too terribly long another malign pervert takes a shine to her; even though the European man has grown to despise Lolita—who isn’t getting any younger or more cultured—the last thing he is about to do is let some other interloper abscond with her like he weren’t standing right there glaring his most astringent glare. The only character in this captivating and hideous story who I’m able to identify with at all is the dowdy American woman, Charlotte Haze, who makes the fateful mistake of renting the European man a room, thereby unthinkingly introducing him to her lewd little daughter. We are all Charlotte Haze, are we not, when disreputable shit is going on around us and those involved are going to great lengths not to tell us anything? I think some people just call that “family life.” In Stanley Kubrick’s uneven and uncharacteristically slack film version of Lolita (1962), Shelley Winters gives the standout performance of the whole picture, imbuing Charlotte with more pathos and with more ironic humour than she has in the novel. This is a variation on the job Shelley Winters was basically always given. She was widely-reputed to be the smartest woman in Hollywood—somebody once told me she knew at least as much as the C.I.A.—but anybody can see that she isn’t anybody’s idea of a classic screen beauty. (You put her next to Elizabeth Taylor and she doesn’t have to act embarrassed.) In great and immortal films like He Ran All the Way and A Place in the Sun, both from 1951, Shelley Winter is treated with cruelty and unnecessary meanness by men like John Garfield and Montgomery Clift until she girds her loins and finally prepares herself to have them treat her with love…and they treat her even worse.   

Air Quality: Yellow

 

I am nervous and excited because my old psychiatrist, who I was able to walk all over like a Persian rug, ran away with the Moscow State Circus and in an hour-and-a-half I meet my new psychiatrist who has an Italian surname and who I therefore assume can give as good as he gets/takes. We will have to quickly establish that I am the top and he the bottom. That's how it works. They say the air quality today poses only a moderate risk to the health and welfare of Calgary's residents, but I'm having some trouble taking that claim altogether seriously. I'm not saying it's code burgundy out there or anything catastrophic like that, but it's definitely at least as nasty as cottage cheese in your undies. Today we are all chimney sweeps at large!

Derek Bailey and Tristan Honsinger, Duo [Full Album]

The Artists and Bands with Top Representation in My Vinyl Collection

 

Albert Ayler: Five Records and Two Box Sets

Don Cherry: Eight Records

Ornette Coleman: Eleven Records

John Coltrane: Ten Records

The Dead C: Eight Records

Eric Dolphy: Nine Records

John Fahey: Nine Records

The Fall: Eleven Records

Merzbow: Eight Records

Royal Trux: Nine Records

Sun Ra Arkestra: Eleven Records and a Box Set

Neil Young: Nine Records