A Few Words More on Recovery

 

The Author Poses in Front of His Small Garden

Because still in 2026 it is not anything like commonplace knowledge to anybody other than the long-suffering or the recovering-in-practice alcoholic and/or addict, I thought I would take a moment before casually deplatforming myself for a spell so that I might delve deeper into personal inventory and spend less time worried about making some kind of small ongoing public splash, to fill you in on what I believe to be far and away the two most important lines in the colloquially-designated Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous (the cover of which has always just said Alcoholics Anonymous). While in a very real way the concept of anonymity was of foremost importance to Bill Wilson, Dr. Bob, and early adopters of the program, I don’t at all myself believe anonymity to have the same cultural value or cachet it had in the 1930s here where we find ourselves now in the world of TikTok and Twitter. (That being said, it remains good form for the recovering alcoholic to abstain from telling others, especially normies, who they have seen in attendance at this or that meeting.) The key principle to my mind is the whole one day at a time precept, which is something most people who have a cursory knowledge of twelve-step recovery will be in some sense aware of but may not have seen explicated in the flawless language of the Big Book (page 85): “What we really have is a daily reprieve contingent on the maintenance of our spiritual condition.” Suffice it then to say that it’s not a matter of there being no future to worry about and every sequential day another frivolous day at the beach. The alcoholic is physically, emotionally, and spiritually sick and had better do their damndest to work on that third piece with at least as much vigilance and they do the first two. A spiritually sick person will go all wrong and the spiritually sick alcoholic/addict will pick up the drug of choice or the next best destructive thing. A simple and useful way to describe spirituality is as cosmic and worldly connectedness, but there isn’t any prosaic language that can lay it out for the neophyte in a manner that won’t sound fuzzy and incorporeal. The individual person must feel their way into and through spiritual awareness like somebody trying not to bump into anything in pitch dark. Alas, possible nightmares await all who kid themselves…and we all kid ourselves betimes. Addiction can be horrifying even with many years clean and/or sober and life going along famously when we capture a sharp, devastating flicker of awareness of how close we might in fact be to going too far off course…perhaps irretrievably so. The second most important line in the Big Book (page 43) is the most terrifying fact I know about alcoholism and the most terrifying fact of any kind that I have had validated by personal experience: “The alcoholic at certain times has no effective mental defence against the first drink. Except in a few rare cases, neither he nor any other human being can provide such a defence. His defence must come from a Higher Power.” Wait a second, does this mean that the alcoholic and/or addict can relapse as though directed by a domineering inner daemon or malevolent supernatural force? Yes, that is what it means and that is exactly what it feels like. The alcoholic a couple years sober may find themself walking to the liquor store and asking “what the fuck is happening?” as they march forward like infantry, all but unstoppable. In actual fact, it happens all the time. That is why the recovering alcoholic and/or addict must do daily personal inventory, clean their side of the street (wherever possible), and work on their relationship with the bigger picture. Recovery is there to forestall future horrors more than it is there for any other practicable reason. Philip Seymour Hoffman, for example, with his twenty-plus years sober in the program, knew that perfectly, and yet he’s dead. It’s usually trial by fire. When you get sober your old friends vacate the premises almost totally. A certain person in a certain position won’t have too much trouble conceding: well, I guess it’s just me and God now. I’ve been working at recovery since 2009 and I still only have a slipshod notion of how to go about it (and all of two months clean and sober as of yesterday). At the very least, I can say I take recovery extremely seriously and insist it defines me more than gender, ethnicity, or nationality. Obviously I’m not trying to win any popularity contests. The other day as I left my house in the midst of brutal dental pain and a searing existential crisis, I closed my door and prepared to lock it; for a moment I was dumbstruck with fear that I might buy liquor while I was out. Looking down I saw my old recovery key chain, of which I almost never take conscious notice these days, procured in 2013 on Vancouver Island. A pair of shoes on the front and an inscription on the back: “STAY IN YOUR SHOES.” Instantly I knew that there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that I was getting loaded that night. That’s not a Higher Power. No. That’s evidence of a Higher Power. In that moment it was more than enough.

Monsters Never Die

Process (C.S. Leigh, 2004)

Colloque de chiens (Raúl Ruiz, 1977)

I remembered my father's bitter phrase, "Monsters never die," and I shuddered. I drank a mug of wine without pausing.

- Manuel Mujica Lainez, Bomarzo

There was never no love

No kind of

Any kind of love

Love was there for certain

Never, never ever.

Instead there was

Flotsam and

Cosmic abandonment’s 

Drifts, how uneasily 

All gracelessness shifts

Shuffling in nullity;

Cleaved notions

The Pacific Ocean.

There never was no

Fellowship also

Friends were

Abstract projections 

Oblivious to oblivions

In naught and ingratiation

Whatever breathes so fickle

Never touches;

Things and their 

Moats of atomic buffer.

Time as we simplify 

And compartmentalize

No there wasn’t

It was not

Not until we arrived

To impose and clove it

Encoded and cloak’d

Meaning Kant was

Errant as Newton

In nude foreboding.

The seas remain

Forever barely explored

The Pacific Ocean

And its impossible Luciferian force

Could power the enlightenment 

Of eternity's creatures 

Whom God will not 

Allow to arrive besides

No, certainly not

On account of 

There never was no love.

The most infernal creatures

Deep in blank witholding sea

Where light cannot reach;

Monsters never die

They just lay down in the garden

Toppled by red wine

And in their loveless state

They petrify.

Morton Feldman, "For Samuel Beckett"

Top Ten Jazz Bassists

 

Charles Mingus

Jimmy Garrison 

Charlie Haden

Ron Carter

William Parker

Barre Phillips

Henry Grimes

Malachi Favors Maghostut

Ronnie Boykins

Ingebrigt Håker Flaten

Charles Mingus Sextet 
Oslo, 1964

News of the World (Vodún Edition)

Strip Nude for Your Killer (Andrea Bianchi, 1975)

The Great Muppet Caper (Jim Henson, 1981)

I've warned you repeatedly and now you look on helplessly as the great and indefatigable Bret Michaels is laid woefully low for the foreseeable: the power and authority of the Fozzie Bear vodún/loa/daemon are second to none and to find out the hard way is to get knocked about and positively dropped. Of what principal properties does the Fozzie Bear vodún/loa/daemon consist? Look at it this way, simplified but not excessively so: Fozzie Bear combines the early pre-Gracie teenage vaudevillean George Burns, doing pratfall comedy with roller skates and similar cockamamie business, with an irrepressible sui generis enthusiasm that your normative world-frame will never be able to either assimilate or suppress. It's a good thing Bret Michaels opted for the surgery because trying to pass those stones would have shredded his dick complètement. One of the laws of both African and Haitian voodoo is that whatever you do you definitely don't want to strip nude for your killer. When those heavy cosmogenic forces come down upon you, passing through astral bodies like X-ray, you want to be in good health, dressed to the nines, and wearing an easeful, frolicsome expression on your face. Alas, Fozzie may just fuck you up anyway. Give you the heavyweight treatment. It is okay to become psychotic, saturated in archetypal spirits, but when you do so your whole domestic set-up better look good from a distance or the bird's-eye view. Not nearly as many people are able to host the Fozzie Bear vodún/loa/daemon as was once the case, so props to Kayla from local gutter punk band Puppet Wipes who is the only person I know at all well who has the same Fozzie Bear knack that I do. Shalom.

Antoine Dougbé et L'Orchestre Poly-Rythmo De Cotonou

The human race cannot be satisfied unless it is inundated each and ever day with far more music than any creatural intelligence could ever make sense of let alone catalogue. I would not be able to keep a straight face and tell you that this or that release was the best reissue or archival release of the year, on vinyl or otherwise, simply because I am not in a position to have gathered enough information and everybody reading this implicitly knows that. However, I think I can comfortably assert that the recent Analog Africa release of the collected works of Antoine Dougbé et L'Orchestre Poly-Rythmo De Cotonou, originally recorded between 1977 and 1982, is the best archival release of 2026 with which I have found myself in, ahem, possession. Hailing from Benin, Antoine Dougbé was the son of a vodún priest and would go on to become one himself, ultimately dying of cirrhosis of the liver. He would often call himself the devil's prime minister. Whereas L'Orchestre Poly-Rythmo De Cotonou consisted of a stacked lineup of top-shelf virtuosic musicians, many among them vodún initiates themselves, Dougbé learned to produce songs by singing and making complex rhythms slapping his hands on his legs. The sublime, upbeat party music Dougbé made with the Orchestre stands at the threshold of postmodernism and Pan-African globalization. Rhythms and percussion are influenced by Afro-Cuban traditions and Congolese rumba figures too. The presence of synthesizers in the arrangements serves also to emphasize the pathbreaking transglobal nature of this exciting and energetic music. Should you fail to procure for yourself a personal copy of this extremely fine double LP of West African sublimity, well, that's your funeral, dawg. 

Antoine Dougbé et L'Orchestre Poly-Rythmo De Cotonou

"Vile De Nan Gni Noude"

The Marx Brothers

 

You want to know where you can get a hold of Mrs. Potter? I don't know, she's awfully ticklish.
- Groucho Marx in Cocoanuts (1929)

Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1933)

In my early teens, when I was already an avid and devout cinephile, I was quite comfortably a fan of the films of Woody Allen, from the early days of zany schtick to the more adult tragicomedies of later years. A kind of biologically programmed contrarian even then, I would have likely told you that though perfectly agreeable fare for the most part, both Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979) were overrated, whereas Radio Days (1987) and Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) were profoundly undervalued. It never dawned on me that Woody Allen might be a creep or a sex pest, and the jury’s still out on that as far as I’m concerned. To me it always appeared that he had the whole field of adult experience more or less corned and that, if anything, he wrote women even better than he wrote men. He started out in standup comedy and as a very young jokester, more than a little wet behind the ears, he worked as a writer on Sid Caesar’s pioneering sketch comedy program Your Show of Shows (1950-1954), so maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that Allen’s mature films are characterized above all by standalone gags and/or individual bits of business. As an often maudlin and even suicidal preteen, one short sequence from 1986’s Hannah and Her Sisters made a huge and lasting impression on me (it’s one I imagine many stalwart fans of this shady and-at-least-a-little-problematic filmmaker esteem to the degree I once did and I suppose still do). Fresh off a failed suicide attempt, the gun having slipped off his sweaty forehead and the bullet having missed, Allen’s character wanders the New York City streets in a daze until he comes upon a movie theatre playing the classic 1933 Marx Brothers spoof Duck Soup, the brothers’ outrageous charade of geopolitics and martial fanaticism. Watching the Marx Brothers restores the faith of the Allen character, however fundamentally epistemologically atheistic he may be, as it reminds him that the chaos in God’s world is above all an expression of antic divinity. One may not be able to choose one’s first reaction to chaos, meanness, and randomness in the lived moment, but we do choose how we subsequently react to our initial reaction and to the greater presiding situation. Our freedom and control lie in consciously selecting how we look at what the world is doing right in front of us (in stereo). In Duck Soup itself, even total conflagration and the end of us all are an open question and invitation to militarized merriment without much need of rhyme or reason, no concessions made to folks without a sense of humour. A sense of humour will pull you through and if you haven’t figured that out then you can’t possible be terribly content with yourself, the world, or the God-sized missing puzzle piece you yell upward at with raised fist.

We had the opportunity to screen Duck Soup during my six year tenure as a Board Director and the Programming Chair for Calgary Cinematheque. A friend who attended and sat next to me—a Marx Brothers newbie—turned to me less than a third of the way into the film and with big, wide, astonished eyes said: “this is sooooooo silly.” Well, my friend was right. Yes, the laughs keep raining down like antiaircraft fire, and that’s why these brothers were paid the big bucks, first on the stage and then in the cinemas of the world, but our deeper reaction is awe at the absurdist inventiveness and the full-tilt boogie. The despots and war-drunk generals are not characterized as mendacious, calculating, corrupt, or evil in some overdetermined ideological sense, rather they are inept and buffoonish, Mussolini perhaps in mind and Donald J. Trump avant la lettre. 

Always the straight man to his deliriously promenading clan, fourth brother Zeppo will appear for the final time in Duck Soup. Straight men and comedic foils can be brought in by the truckload from Central Casting. The three remaining brothers could be said to embody one each of pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce’s phenomenological categories of lived modality—firstness, secondness, and thirdness—as tackled by philosopher Gilles Deleuze in his two priceless Cinema books: Harpo is firstness on account of being both mute and maximally expressive, pure affection-image, pure mooning faciality and raw bodily affect; Chico is secondness because he is the action-image, the pugilist who can’t stop talking back, dumb naked fact laid bare, obfuscation plus confusion, resistance, struggle, impassioned reactivity…and hadsy with the ladies besides; Groucho is thirdness because he is the ultimate covert master of language and tongues, entering undefeated into combat with his broadsword all the while appearing to casually/benignly inspect the cleanliness of his fingernails, he is the Master of Ceremonies and as such the mediator of relations. While this may seem to place phallic mastery almost entirely in the, ahem, hands of Groucho, the best reoccurring gag that runs through the corpus of Marx Brothers films is the very real unfeigned virtuosity Harpo and Chico demonstrate on a wide variety of musical instruments (Harpo of course being associated foremost with the harp). Harpo is an overgrown baby and Chico a bullish preadolescent, but when unleashed on musical instruments the two of them play like the greatest concert hall specialists in all the land while pouring all the while the entirely of their individual personae and acumen with respect to subtle visual gags into each nondivisible increment of screen performance time. Is anything quite so sublime anywhere in screen comedy comparative to when Chico turns his index finger into a pistol and hits the exact right piano key at the exact right moment?     

from The Big Store (1941)

from A Night at the Opera (1935)

JPW 2026 Guitar Video Trilogy

 

Rainy Day Appaloosa: Late Night Edition

As Human as the Next Guy

Monkgasm 3

Physical Media + Swag

Demo Lickin' Man 😎

There's No Place Like Home [Full Album + Swag]

 

When the going gets weird

Here comes the Hat and Beard—

The Mad Monk (Johnnie To, 1993)

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives 
(Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010)

Rewind & Play (Alain Gomis, 2022)

For the YouTube version of my new album There's No Place Like Home, embedded directly below, I have gone to characteristically great lengths to make it so that it’s not just a boring inert cover image accompanying forty minutes of a raging brushfire of experimental music, providing each track a modified film clip that suits it. There’s also some little Easter eggs scattered here and there to make the whole thing even more fun, more gratifyingly variegated, and more ontologically colourful.

The Images and Sounds

Table of Contents

1. Foie Gras Poutine (00:04-5:53)

[Sunset Boulevard, Billy Wilder, 1950]

2. Reincarnated as a Carp (5:53-11:50)

[The Pornographers, Shōhei Imamura, 1966]   

3. Synthetic Antiseptic (11:50-15:43)

[Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Chantal Akerman, 1975]

4. Billy the Skid (Likes ‘Em Thicc) (15:43-19:54)

[The Man from Laramie, Anthony Mann, 1955]

5. Monkgasm 1 (19:54-29:47)

[The Turin Horse, Béla Tarr, Ágnes Hranitzky, 2011]

6. Monkgasm 2 (29:47-39:40)

[Tropical Malady, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004]

Ever,

JPW