In Love is Care

 

Dinosaur bones, abundant here beneath us, were first discovered in my home province of Alberta, Canada in 1884 by a geologist named Joseph Burr Tyrrell, partial namesake of the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller. What Tyrrell actually discovered on that happy accident of a dig was the skull of a large carnivorous dinosaur shortly to be named Albertosaurus. When I was a boy I would draw dinosaurs endlessly, in addition to hockey players and rock musicians. Though I am not a geologist like Joseph Burr Tyrrell, in the summer of 1998 I did work as a geological technician, which back then meant I spent lots of time at a funny little machine looking at geological logs, printing them out, splicing pages together at a kind of draughtsman’s board. My favourite parts about most paying jobs are the parts that involve gadgets and tech. 

CÉRÉMONIE D’AMOUR (Walerian Borowczyk, 1988)

Jacques Derrida can take the one word ‘aura’ and break it down to the exact right core elements: The oral, the aura, gold (or), hour (heure). In speaking about and then writing about his dear friend Hélène Cixous, like him a European Jew who spent her childhood and early adolescence in North Africa—or perhaps we should say French colonial North Africa—Derrida finds himself placing Cixous, over and over, on the side of life, mystical array, and endless poetic resurrections. We know that head-down sleek and speedy Jacques Derrida is himself death’s bagman, just as he himself knows it, never out of audible range of the clocks that count down tick tick tick until it’s your precise turn to lay down and take it, however bad it is. From Derrida’s point of view, the philosopher has to worry about this stuff and find some sense in it or who else is gonna? “These are lives of power, at great depths,” writes Hélène Cixous already ahead of the curve, "unsubjected to the clock.” Here is Derrida in H.C. for Life: That is to Say…, his book on his supremely distinguished friend Hélène: "What happens then, as far as belief and the impossible are concerned, when the song of the enchanting chant [chant de l’enchant] can no longer be dissociated from the whole body of words and from what still presents itself as the literality of literature? When literature becomes an enchanting chant?" Hélène Cixous: "We are bodies in minds fast as the radio."

My uncle George was in town for cancer treatments recently and crashed at my place for two nights and we had ourselves a hoot and a holler, let me tell you. Alas, that being said, it was from George that I heard about the recent death of feisty and funny leftist American folk singer Todd Snider. The details were a little hazy at the time, but I guess some folks were more than merely insinuating that Snider had been kicked out of the hospital for being mouthy and broke. I personally didn’t find that very likely. This is the official series of events: some sort of violent altercation involving Snider and others occurred outside his Salt Lake City hotel and he sustained head injuries; Snider sought medical help but was later arrested by police outside the hospital on disorderly conduct and other charges, with bodycam footage showing him pleading for help and complaining he couldn't breathe; days after returning to his home in Tennessee, Snider was hospitalized with walking pneumonia, which would prove to be the official cause of death. While we were out doing the rounds, etc cetera, one of the record shop proprietors fond of my uncle lent him his own personal copy of Snider’s book I Never Met a Story I Didn't Like. I’d be curious to take a gander at that one myself.

Boy Meets Girl (Leos Carax, 1984)

The bottom line of meditation and embodied mindfulness is that you slow yourself down biorhythmically and take deep breaths at the proper tempo, getting the circulatory and respiratory mechanisms in proper alignment with the earth system simply by letting the body open up its impossible roiling depths to feel the universe first and foremost, a haptics of the encounter in which the properties of the invisible feel sensorially at a scale that supersedes anything currently imaginable. It is also true that you can meditate by simply running your eyes over the ceiling for three hours while humming and sobbing to yourself. You can meditate on the sounds of urban automobile traffic. Sometimes when I was a teenager I would cut my arms with razors and tacks and that was a meditation too. It vacated my mind of all thought other than the colour black with fine specks of silver in it, which if you think about it is less a thought than it is a more artifact-like product of epiphenomenal intellection. If my left big toe gets sore in a very particular way then I absolutely must obtain an espresso-based beverage of some kind post haste. In a deep meditative state I am actually able to perform medical surgeries on myself using my own nervous system and carefully directed focus. I can feel everything that is happening to my body during surgery, but it is mostly kind of pleasant, a tingling tenderness vastly superior to the hollowed-out solitude that is my normal daily lot. When I feel my body doing magic for me I tell God that I am grateful and I do that because I am grateful, positioned maybe even at the extremities of lived gratitude, as it were. Like the birth of tragedy her insufficiently-coronated self. In the effervescence of transient light it is we who the frolicking Gods seek to excite. All Gods are equitable but we insist they all pay taxes, no matter how cunning and merciless their lawyers and/or heavies. 

In his book At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life, author Fenton Johnson, who grew up both gay and Catholic in Northern Kentucky, bemoans the heteronormative state of things, arguing that “the stories we tell ourselves embody fantasies of idealized couples and families, even if in unconventional configurations, instead of the rich and rewarding solitary journeys more and more of us are living out.” Figures of distinction from recently history who Johnson praises for their bold and unwavering solitary industriousness include Henry David Thoreau, Paul Cézanne, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Eudora Welty, Rabindranath Tagore, Zora Neale Hurston, Nina Simone, and Bill Cunningham. Here we have Johnson rhapsodizing himself dizzy on the great Impressionist painter Cézanne: “I can say he’s crazy—perceiving a soul in a sugar bowl?—or I can listen to what he’s telling me, in his letters and in his work, which is that the sacred exists in every particle and atom, the sacred is what is, and my job is to pay sufficient attention so that I too can perceive the psychology of the earth—its living, feeling, expressive self, made manifest in rivers and seas and mountains and tornadoes and earthquakes.” Whitman and Dickinson are both presented as appearing to have gradually embraced the solitary life over time, though for each this manifests in a rapturous giving, an impassioned loving enacted both through friendship and literary creation.

Flowers of St. Francis (Roberto Rossellini, 1950)

St. Francis of Assisi had his first spiritual visions as a young prisoner of war and would later go on to purportedly make personal friends with all animals and literally preach sermons to birds. Inspired by Matthew 10:9, which instructs disciples to carry no money or extra clothes, Francis renounced his family's wealth, notoriously stripping naked in the town square to renounce his inheritance before the bishop. Francis referred to his cohort of monks as the "joculatores Domini,” and it was their mission to use joy, song, and poetry to spread the word of a loving God. Fyodor Dostoevsky, on the other hand, started having epileptic episodes complete with strange and disturbing visions in 1846 and the famous fake execution that messed him up for life happened three years later, in 1849. Dostoevsky was taken into a courtyard to be killed, only to be given a last minute reprieve when all hope seemed lost, the whole thing having not evidently amounted to much more than a sick joke. When you start to read about Dostoevsky’s life it starts to become clear why he shook uncontrollably and spoke of visions beyond the means of language to tackle; infernal winds that rip they sky and tear away at animal flesh, winds with a sizzling red rim around them. Sometimes God would put a man on the floor hard if only so he’ll stay still for a moment.

Philip Guston, COUPLE IN BED, 1977

“Why do we imagine solid matter exists?,” poses Aldous Huxley in his 1936 masterpiece Eyeless in Gaza. The answer (the 'why' of it): “Because of the grossness of our sense organs. And why do we imagine that we have coherent experiences and personality? Because our minds work slowly and have very feeble powers of analysis. Our world and we who live in it are creations of stupidity and bad sight.” Look, a case could certainly be made. In his book Spinal Catastrophism, philosopher Thomas Moynihan argues that the work the human spine has done to keep us on two legs is stupid, awkward, and bizarre, such that inevitably we’re uniquely bad at everything even though our brains are phenomenal in theory and we have created all the cities on the surface of the earth, et cetera. We are also proud and pitiful. Where an individual will easily enough identify people making errors, behaving badly, or acting in a devious manner in ordinary life, should you so happen as to point out concrete errors these people have themselves made, unseemly things they’ve done in public, lies of commission or omission, well, you can expect this incidental theoretical person to sulk, pout, and play the victim like the victim were the damn fiddle. That is a large part of why it is tremendously hard to get people to openly and honestly discuss anything in which the emotions can or will figure. Talking about stuff you don’t want to talk about usually helps a little. It’s true. If we all intend to grow it will be necessary that we fess up from time to time. You, for example, you bashful little vamp. You gone and you went away a long time ago and yet I still remember how mean you were, more than just nervy and pugnacious in the usual way...ugly mean. I remember how we ate that great big piece of chocolate cake with two forks and it was almost like being on a date...but you’re too mean for me...you’re mean and you like it that way...

Los olvidados (Luis Buñuel, 1950)

Kelvin

 

Panic in Needle Park (Jerry Schatzberg, 1971)

The Bad Lieutenant (Abel Ferrara, 1992)

I have known Kelvin now for a little over a decade. We went to the same Monday night A.A. meeting for a number of years and originally he had two more years sober than me, not that my own track record has been all that squeaky clean (after a healthy stretch of seven straight years, one day at a time, don't ask me to elaborate). Neither Kelvin nor I handled COVID great, ultimately, and neither of us regained his proper footing in the immediate aftermath. The condition is groundlessness. I didn’t see Kelvin much during the last half of this past year and knowing what that would tend to indicate I could not help but fear the worst. I don’t think I’ve ever told anybody this, but once Kelvin came into the homeless shelter were I was assistant supervisor back in the day, deep into an obviously gruelling crack binge, and he acted contemptuous of me when I offered him my own sandwich, subsequently acting contemptuous of the very idea of his wife and daughter and their existence when I brought them up, trying to assess the scale of the calamity right in front of me. It was the nastiest show you could ever want to see some loathsome, disreputable creep stage publicly. This is the man who taught me the fundamentals of fly fishing and gushed openly and often of his wife and daughter who I saw very clearly as people Kelvin loved with the deep and simple devotion of a normal, decent man. To fuck it all up monumentally? Simply throw in a Ziplock full of crack rock. Kelvin was at the meeting last night for the first time in ages, definitely still in post-acute withdrawal though I was very pleased to see him counted still among us the sour and cantankerous living, here as we are to nurture, however boorish and bothersome we may at times be in our untimely ministrations. Kelvin had gone out on crack and booze agin and was couch surfing currently. I took him and bought him a sausage roll at a place I know and put the screws to him real blunt-like. Okay, fess up, kid, what the fuck happened this time? Are you not yet already sufficiently smeared across the tarmac? In answer to this question, Kelvin, nobody’s idea of an intellectual, said as wise and true a thing as has ever been said on the subject of relapse, brevity being one of the statement's main selling points. He said: “the obsession came back.” A blue bolt shot downward through my spine. Then Kelvin told me a story about how just before Christmas he was driving in his car with a drug dealer to whom he owed a considerable amount of money. Stopped at a freshly-red light at 17th Ave. and 14th St. SW, Kelvin had turned his keys and pink slips over to the dealer and just started walking directionless through the snow in a hoodie and beat-up sneakers. I was of several minds respective of the fact that Kelvin told this story in a cheerful and upbeat manner that obviously couldn't do much to eclipse how nightmarish the actual experience would have had to have been (and I’ve had similar, alas). These impossible goddamn addicts, am I right? They’d snort and chortle at the fucking gallows.

Top Ten Rock Albums in Chronological Order

Rock 'n' roll music, any old way you chose it, is one of the things I know I will miss when I'm on my way out. I love it, and have from the beginning, even its attractive imbecilities.

- Alexander Theroux, The Grammar of Rock

Bo Diddley, Have Guitar Will Travel (1960)

Kinks, The Kink Kontroversy (1965)

Creedence Clearwater Revival, Bayou Country (1969)

X, Wild Gift (1981)

Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Re·ac·tor (1981)

Meat Puppets, Meat Puppets II (1984)

Royal Trux, Twin Infinitives (1990)

The Dead C, Harsh 70s Reality (1992)

Jim O'Rourke, Insignificance (2001)

Lambchop, FLOTUS (2016)

Royal Trux, "Ice Cream"

Xs and Os to all of my hoes! 💪💫 

Ten from the Popular American Counterculture (1966-1971)

First of all, I had no choice but to be independent in my life because I wasn’t happy with my life. I wanted to change it. And that carried over into everything: how I lived my life, how I found my jobs or education. When I came to making movies, there was this streak in me of being counter, being against. Not for, but against something. And I was against Hollywood.

- Bob Rafelson

Brewster McCloud (Robert Altman, 1971)

Little Murders (Alan Arkin, 1971)

Two-Lane Blacktop (Monte Hellman, 1971)

Hi, Mom! (Brian De Palma, 1970)

Zabriskie Point (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1970)

Taking Off (Miloš Forman, 1971)

Cult of the Damned (Robert Thom, 1969)

Head (Bob Rafelson, 1968)

Skidoo (Otto Preminger, 1968)

Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969)

Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, "Dropout Boogie"

Erlton, Calgary, February 1, 2026

Navigable Space

 

Hitler: A Film from Germany (Hans Jürgen Syberberg, 1977)

Level Five (Chris Marker, 1997)

Aggro Dr1ft (Harmony Korine, 2023)

Nobody rocks the cock like Cyndi Pinziki!

- Nora Dunn in Southland Tales (Richard Kelly, 2006)

Crystallizing gradually into a human thing, stumbling like a bull in a china shop through the Anthropocene, we were first of all errant sense-perception inadvertently let loose on solid rock in tennis shoes and bright white socks. Early man is reported to have had consistent difficulty determining if something was moving toward him or he toward it. The big breakthrough in Analytical Philosophy is we're all playing war games as soon as we're able to imagine what's around the corner (and probably enraged).

If you start to think about it, immersive 3D virtual reality simulators are far less virtual than your own diaphanous consciousness, locked up somewhere tight and to detection impervious. My phenomenological method is: I don't know what that thing is, give me a minute. There are for sure going to be new topographies to navigate and we do not yet know the language for them. Thebes. Bathing in the blood of the lamb.  

From the standpoint of psychology and neuroscience, navigable space relates to the creature's mental representation of the environment while moving through it, wayfinding and locomotion. In relation to video games, navigable space relates to increasingly complex navigable topographies that are frequently non-Euclidean. Spinoza said that we do not yet know of what a body is capable and I would be inclined to argue that the same could be said for the fanciful places we might sequester that body. There is no hell and damnation for bodies. There are only the worms. And the teeming talkative flies of Maurice Blanchot's The Most High.  

Ready Player One (Steven Spielberg, 2018)

Jason Philip Wierzba, The Navigable Space EP

  

Twelve Facts About the Ailing Author

 

1. I am the rabbit.

2. If you are not friendly or kind to me or others in the vicinity it is probable I will lash out at you and I'm aware that's somewhat paradoxical.

3. The male actors I always related to most as a young man were Edward G. Robinson and Warren Oates, which even I know is extremely weird.

4. It is true that at about thirteen or fourteen I was starting goaltender for the team that won the Alberta Hockey Provincial Championship...in the bottom division. Did you know that in hockey the starting goaltender is roughly equivalent to the starting quarterback in American football? The first rule of goaltending is: keep your eye on the movement of the players in relation to the puck. When you start to look at the rest of the lifeworld that way you begin to see people for the dung beetles they truly are.

5. I must have some relatively mild variant of pica because as a kid I loved eating dirt, sand, and grass, enjoying frequently also the pleasures of a good sucking rock, like Beckett's Molloy in his exaggerated frenzy of directionlessness. When I started to get a little older I became much more likely to cut to the quick and just cut myself.

6. The best concert I ever attended was Charlie Haden's Quartet West at Calgary's Knox United Church back in the days when I was good and fucked up every damn day on the beleaguered calendar, though that did not serve in this instance to undermine my recollection. It was a divine performance and the acoustics were extrasensory. They did a super long version of Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman" and I cried through most of it.          

7. I've been telling friends and gas station attendants that Quentin Tarantino's final film as a director of feature length theatrical movies should be about sex-workers in the Old West. His McCabe & Mrs. Miller, if you will. 

8. My highly innovative approach to guitar means that all-too-regularly douchebags insist I'm inept. Buddy, it takes supernatural groundedness and much study to hit it this inept. When Thomas Merton was asked what he learned from Buddhism, he replied: "How to be a better Christian." 

9. Gary Snyder has always been my favourite among the hallowed "Beat poets." The critic Richard Tillinghast wrote that Snyder possesses “a command of geology, anthropology and evolutionary biology unmatched among contemporary poets.” Exactly!

10. What I am right now today in my basement most excited about is Radiance's recent super sexy twin releases of Blu-rays for Luchino Visconti's Le notti bianche (1957) and Robert Bresson's Une femme douce (1969). Perfect for the ever-lurking Dostoevsky stan in your life.

11. I love Jennifer Jason Leigh a lot and believe her to be one of the very finest screen actresses of all time, along with the likes of Greta Garbo and Simone Signoret, but I'll confess I got a little cross with her when on a accompanying special feature for a Blu-ray of the great and inexhaustible Miami Blues (1990), Leigh, female lead, asserts that the film in question was the director George Armitage's debut in that capacity. Actually, he had already directed four low-budget features by that point. Yowza.

12. I was thirteen when I first got good and drunk. We were in the country and I was hanging out with some sixteen-year-old boys who had drivers' licences. One of the boys called the little general store in Priddis and said he was sending his son to grab some alcoholic spirits and would she please accommodate, after which another boy was dispatched to go grab the haul. We drank it down with panache. Shortly thereafter, the older boys started getting sick and throwing up while I went rifling inquisitively through my friend's parents' liquor cabinet. Following the underwhelming climax of our hella sloppy revelries, I returned home and quietly watched a little bit of Saturday Night Live...with my parents.   

Edward G. Robinson in The Whole Town's Talking (John Ford, 1935)

Warren Oates in Cockfighter (Monte Hellman, 1974)

    

  

At Rest, 2026

I think a person making a film should try not to control what it says, except on the level of dramatic pleasure. One should let things happen, through a kind of “écriture automatique.” A film is like a plant—you have to let it grow by itself, you have to respect that kind of biological rhythm.

- Alain Resnais

I had gone as far as Pennsylvania and Virginia to pitch my crazy dream. Yes, some people actually looked at me like that, a crazed artist with a lofty dream. A number of times, people would be whispering in giggles as I did video presentations in their homes or offices. Some even treated me like a beggar, giving me pocket money so that I would not bother them again. That was when I met Paul Tañedo, a Filipino photography artist in Alexandria, Virginia. He liked what he saw in the 16mm black and white footage and committed to support it. It was a simple talk over coffee very early in the morning. What hooked him were the black and white shots. Beautiful. Nothing beats 16mm black and white stock 7222. The grains and depths are fiercely powerful.

- Lav Diaz

Gambling, Gods and LSD (Peter Mettler, 2002)

Liverpool (Lisandro Alonso, 2008)

The Woman Who Left (Lav Diaz, 2016)

Wierzba's Subterranean Calgary Screening Room

Bill Fay, "Who is the Sender?"