Dates in August and September

Heart of Glass (Werner Herzog, 1976)

Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966)

Lizzie overdosed on a toxic cocktail of street drugs again and I had to go pick her up at the decrepit bar near the hospital. When I came in she waved me off as though that were some kind of greeting. Lizz, I said, what the hell, girl? are you trying to land yourself dead and gone? She was drinking a water glass full of straight scotch. That’s about the size of it, shorty, she agreed. She complained that she’d been seeing visions of the serpentine underbelly of the Mother of Worms, a slithering organism beyond any scale of mass we currently comprehend. I was dismayed that Lizzie intends to go on with her tour of the northeast in August and September when all the young ones who adore her so are back at school and getting wasted like soccer hooligans and bridesmaids. I asked her why she’s so gaga over this frankly-reckless tour and she casually explained that there is a guy in Halifax selling a seaworthy vessel for personal use. 

My money guy sent me a little slip that says I don’t have any more of the do-re-mi and I believe I am supposed to take it to H&R Block and file it with those folks. They will not pity me because they will correctly assume that I am a hobo. Is a hobo a hoe-boy? Usually. On the farm you’ll find the hoe and many other toys but the more they make you play the more you’ll want to bust out of there quick quick like a bunny. Already dangerous people came out to settle these western lands after the schizzy catastrophe of Columbus and no matter how bad a motherfucker you were when you set out, by the time you got to Calgary, where the Bow and Elbow rivers charmingly conjoin and the buffalo look at you like a trespasser, a whole heap of new trauma had been added to your bundle and you couldn’t really be expected to have much regulatory control with respect to the nastier and/or thornier emotions. There is a scene right at the end of Werner Herzog’s wonderful 1976 narrative film Heart of Glass where a group of well-appointed men from late-antiquity stand on a rocky shoreline whilst sending off a small skiff full of their intrepid peers who head in the direction of the horizon just to see what is going to happen. This sort of shit-or-get-off-the-pot foolhardiness is perhaps the thing I find most endearing in people. True love means I’ll be your crash test dummy. Of course, there is also that sublime opening epilogue to Andre Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev and its Icarus in shorn armour, Yefim, the peasant and artisan who builds his unwieldy flying machine and is thereafter taken for one hell of a bumpy a ride.

Lizzie said I’m too thin and that I need to put on ten pounds or will no longer be given contracts to work. I asked Lizzie what she thinks of the possibility that we’ll all be immortal someday just like those Church of Perpetual Life nuts would have it. She said the most fascinating thing ever: if we gain immortality we give up fertility because mathematically you can’t have both. You see? That’s why this little bitch is so famous, dawg!

When I was a grad student in philosophy at Western University in London, Ontario back when things were a whole lot sketchier and more sub rosa, I sold weed and coke out of a small nondescript house within walking distance of campus. One day a student I vaguely recognized came in, pulled a gun, collected all my drugs, money, and jewelry, then gingerly stepped out the way he’d come. Neither of us stopped being students at Western University. I saw him around campus semi-regularly. I was upset and dismayed, to be sure, I had never really encountered gumption of this kind previously and there wasn’t any clear road to the attainment of satisfaction from my end of the deal. Well, that is until I told my friend Jay, former high school football star and ex con and during the period we’re addressing a dope fiend and passable lady’s man with some kind of government income that never got brought up. He was also scary and unpredictable. The son of a small town Ontario sheriff, Jay had adopted the attitude that he could talk however he wanted to law enforcement and this really scared the shit out of me. Normally I did not like being in a car with him. However, many months after the initial incident with the armed-robbery-in-private-residence, I happened to tell Jay and Jay predictably lit-up with mirth, zeal, and mayhem. I had a pretty good sense that we were about to break the law a little more than I had ever wanted or intended to break it. Let’s hope it doesn’t turn out like that awful Irréversible, the nasty Gaspar Noé movie that was still pretty new! In all honesty? It did actually get pretty close to that bad, though the hard part for me was not knowing how bad it was going to get or how soon it would be over. We found the guy and Jay gave him a good going over, warm up—and I saw for sure that he lost some teeth—before throwing him in the back of the Dodge and driving him to the outskirts of town where he was dumped in a ditch with a gun pointed at him and ordered to take his pants off. Once the guy had managed to get his pants all the way down, Jay signalled me with a nod and we jumped quick quick back in the truck and sped out of there with a screech.     

Streets of Fire (Walter Hill, 1984)

This That Is and Isn't

Erlton Represent

This is me. This is me in a Tiffany display window working a run in my garter in the red light district of the mad and infamous. This is I, the slut with the sappy sermonizing. This is I spy with my little eye-in-the-sky (something that is pumpernickel). What kind of a drunk am I? Is it that specific bright-eyed and bushy-tailed guy in the A.A. meeting who says his drug of choice is “more” and has stories about snorting crystal with seven luchadors and a blind Uruguayan pimp and things of that nature? No. I am a drunk of dark impossibly depthless depths and cruel tongue like Patty Highsmith. This is me, a low bottom drunk even though there is only one bottom and that bottom is death, the crack of your neck hitting pay dirt, a real Dustbusting bonanza. In active alcoholism I had my kidneys fail a number of times and received a blood transfusion. The first kidney shutdown experience was so fucking nightmarish—certainly the worst thing I had ever endured up until then—that it would not be likely to enter the mind of a normal person (i.e. a normie) that I would in contravention of all sense proceed to go and do it to myself a couple more times. This is why the old-school recovery crusaders describe the disease of addition as “cunning, baffling, and powerful.” One final reminder: physical craving and mental obsession are the two principal symptoms of addiction. But surely you already know all this. Do I belong to any organization whose foremost principle is that of anonymity? I’m afraid that I don’t really know how to answer that question.

This is me. I am Mimi. I am lionine and on the decline, pleased as a peck of pickled peppers. I have had a grisly fucking run of it so far this decade and because I don’t care when—not if, naturally—I die...well...nobody knows how far I’ll go. Not far, champ, I assure ye. I get dizzy getting out of bed. I am good at eliciting disgust and contempt. I am very often sad. I often wish folks were better able to apprehend that I have a mood disorder, not a cognitive one. What are you gonna do, that’s people and places and things outside your micromanaging-inclined control again, isn’t it? I remember that when I was hospitalized at Rockyview following the psychosis, public nudity, and frostbite incident, I begged the doctors to send me to Switzerland to be euthanized, still pretty loopy, and I can state without doubt that I had Jean-Luc Godard at least part in mind because of how deeply I had been touched upon discovering that Godard’s longterm common-law partner and creative collaborator Anne-Marie Miéville, who he had been with since the late-70s though the two were amicably separated and no longer residing together, had walked arm and arm with the great Swiss filmmaker to his final appointment [see photo directly above]. Clock that one as a plenty dignified exit!

Marianne Faithfull, "As Tears Go By"

Novacene

 

'I saw a reconstruction of Newcomen’s ‘atmospheric steam engine’ in 1926 when I was seven years old.” This is the sentence that opens the brief epilogue of James Lovelock’s altogether compact Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence, a book published in July of 2019, two years to the month before the author would die at the age of one-hundred-and-three. Lovelock was born the same year as J.D. Salinger, Jennifer Jones, Jackie Robinson, and my grandpa Jim. What makes Lovelock’s age especially notable from the standpoint of Novacene is that it seems to help the reader believe they’re in the hands of someone with a mind uniquely attuned to the long game. Consider, as an example, a crucial passage from fairly late in the book: “Indeed, in certain ways, such as the ubiquity of personal computers and mobile phones, we are already at a stage similar to that of the Anthropocene in the early twentieth century. In the 1900s we had internal-combustion-powered cars, basic aircraft, fast trains, electricity available for homes, telephones and even the basics of digital computing. A century later the world has been transformed by the explosive development of these technologies.” Lovelock was among other things the creator of the Gaia Hypothesis, and that is certainly how I first became familiar with him. The basic idea is that the earth is a single contained creature or interdependent organic system and the rest of us all mere creature features. Humanity's realization of the central importance of the entirety of its constitutive systems has become critical in recent years. The cosmos is 13.8 billion years old, earth 4.5 billion years old, life on Earth has been around for 3.7 billion years, and human life for “just over 300,000 years.” Intelligent life emerged as a unique quirk of evolutionary contingency, and human beings would seem to be “a freakish one-off” on the cosmological scale. The earth itself is getting old, increasingly frail, even if human beings remain a relatively fresh novelty. The good news and the bad news, swaying like an alert cobra: “our supremacy as the prime understanders of the cosmos is rapidly coming to an end.” Homeostasis is largely a matter of thermostasis, and carbon-based organic life has evolved to do the complicated cooperative work of serving these ends out day by day. Lovelock says that technically he is an engineer rather than a scientist and that he would rather possess a keen sense of obscure mechanics than a table or chart of explanatory numbers. There is an “honourable deceit” in engineering dynamic systems that you can describe but cannot truly explain. Asked by NASA in 1961 to help provide the first Surveyor mission with a gas chromatograph, Lovelock knew that he could but knew also that he wouldn’t have had the ability to explain quite how. This basic model of reasoning can be extrapolated and unravelled such that we might then make a quick leap and task ourselves with imagining how future silicon-based (or not) cybernetic intelligence(s) could be expected to evolve within the context of dynamic super-finessed systems-coordination utterly at odds with “the single-channel, step-by-step arguments of classical logic.” In the gradual development from Deep Blue, which beat Garry Kasparov in 1997, to AlphaZero (which plays chess, Go, and Shogi) in 2017, we have witnessed the graduation of artificial intelligence systems to the status of superhuman. We can’t truly know how skilled AlphaZero is “because there are no humans it can compete against.” Lovelock sees the emergence of artificial cyborg intelligence as a product of Gaia, a breakthrough within the evolution of the Gaia system to which mankind will have been best case scenario foremost handmaiden, a veritable parent. It surely bears mentioning that ours is a planet that ought to be far too hot for habitation. It is only the impossibly perfect conditions of earthly homeostasis that have thus far prevented this place from becoming another Venus. Lovelock is confident AI will see it that way. What prevents the likelihood of an all-out Terminator-style mass-extermination of humans by cyborgs? If AI wants this planet it’s going to have to take us along with it...and make sure we’re fed and watered. 

High Life (Claire Denis, 2018)

Patsy Cline, "Stop The World (And Let Me Off)"

Forensic Architecture

 

Born in Haifa and for many years a noted academic with an openly radical bent, Eyal Weizman would go on to become the co-founder and most prominent public representative of Forensic Architecture, an agency founded in 2010 with a mandate to focus on both research and advocacy, especially in instances where military and policing powers may have been misused (cough, cough). In February of 2020 Weizman was barred from attaining a travel visa with which to enter the United States when an algorithm purportedly flagged him as a security risk. Forensic Architecture conceives of itself as a counter-forensics, turning the forensic gaze back against the State; it is also a new species of transsystemic systems analysis appropriate to an era of satellite imagery, metadata, and multimedia. In a manner analogous to international travel, the thorough consideration of any event or event variable must be performed with respect paid to and consideration for the qualifiable terms of the active surrounding systems bordered everywhere by other systems, surging or waning, and so on, nobody ever quite sure who all is watching. A huge part of what Weizman himself targets are the preconceptions of Statist ideologies. That being said, what most excites about Forensic Architecture as a body with a whole lot of organs is the timeliness and extraordinary rigour of the work carried out in its name. Weizman: “[Forensic Architecture] regards the common elements of our built environment—buildings, details, cities, and landscapes, as well as their representations in media and as data—as entry points from which to interrogate contemporary processes.” The architectural analysis of “incidents in their contexts” seeks to pull from the incidents, contexts, and “their microphysical details the longer threads of political and social processes.” Weizman makes it clear that there are three tiers to his organization’s work: field (data collection), laboratory (transformation of data into evidence), and forum (the presentation of evidence and findings). Part of what makes this work so distinct from most theory, however, is that the “forum” dimension of the agency’s work does include presentations made in a juridicial context, whether the courts in question exist within nation states or as international institutions/bodies (like the ICC). There are many more kinds of evidence of any given event than you may imagine and these not merely reducible to “drawings, models, aerial and ground-level photographs of buildings” and that sort of everyday pedestrian stuff: evidence relating to the analysis of buildings and built environments; basic criminal-investigation-type forensics; audio-visual collection/collation by/for news media outlets or social media users (all significant events are multi-camera); remote sensing technologies; osteobiography; historical document analysis; direct interviews; a general analytics of testimony; and analysis of climate factors (i.e. historical patterns of aridity and desertification). As for architecture itself, Weizman repeatedly makes the case that buildings and built spaces are capable of prehension (versus apprehension or comprehension). An example would be how “it takes years for an air bubble trapped between a wall and a fast-drying paint to make its way up the building facade.” The responsibility for the 2013 collapse of a large sweatshop in Bangladesh is split, argues Weizman, between the structure itself, the surrounding infrastructure, and global economic systems. Drone attacks on buildings also involve holes in the roofs of buildings, the ordnance—usually Lockheed Martin Hellfire antitank missiles—tending to explode inside rooms deeper within a given structure, maximizing kill rates while leaving most of the structure intact. Weizman looks at how various nation states—especially Israel—use humanitarian rhetoric to their own ends, producing a troubling space for discursive and juridicial redress or anything resembling even the intestinal rumblings of accountability. Weizman conceives of a new extraterritorialization of the demos in terms of modern combat, climate change, and environmental violence. How does one operate in the zone of resource wars and chaotic mobility, a great big spinning machine that eats refugees, while we are each of us casually gathered like sleepwalkers into our little groups, not unlike the dazed and inattentive players of Pokémon GO, fad of yesteryear? Weizman advises that you operate “close to and under the threshold of detectability.”  I would add that if you have a kayak you can be both under and above the threshold of detectability at one and the same fanciful-ass time. Just saying.

Black Sunday (John Frankenheimer, 1977)

Love & Peace (Sion Sono, 2015)

Patty Party [in Chronological Order]

Aside from The Talented Mr. Ripley, which is the greatest crime novel ever written, my favourite Patty novels are A Dog's Ransom and Edith's Diary.  

Big Daddy Blues [Selfie]

 

Carbon Ideologies

 

Don Quixote (G.W. Pabst, 1933)

Harlan County U.S.A. (Barbara Kopple, 1976)

The Human Surge (Eduardo Williams, 2016)

In No Immediate Danger, the first of William T. Vollmann’s twin Carbon Ideologies door-stoppers, much time is given sheepishly over to straight-up science and a whole heap-load of British Thermal Units and parts-per-billion number crunching, only to then move on to Vollmann's adventures in post-Fukushima Japan with his dosimeter, pancake frisker, kindliness, and razor wit. The second volume, No Good Alternative, consists almost entirely of reportage and essayistic asides. While Vollmann can be biting and sarcastic, he is always a man on the ground in good faith; he is interested in people, even sometimes declaring that he likes very much people that you or I might find it very difficult to like indeed; the sarcasm and gallows humour are counterpoint to what must be a genuine streak of folksy ingenuousness. Many people probably don’t know that for however long a period in the early ‘90s the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation considered Vollmann a serious suspect in the Unabomber case. Long fascinated by and concerned with the plight of sex workers, in the early ‘80s Vollmann once rescued and secured the freedom of a young Thai girl confined to a rural brothel while in Thailand on assignment for Spin magazine. Vollmann is also a notorious, publicly open cross-dresser and his alter personality is named Dolores. You may or may not wish to drop in on or check up on The Book of Dolores, a 2013 collection of photographs and essays. A driven dragoon who will go considerable distance to get his story, Vollmann never seems to stop. Hence the glut. He is reported to have extremely bad carpal tunnel from constantly writing. At one point in No Good Alternative he tells us he revised the chapter we are in the process of reading on a bullet train to Tokyo. Carbon Ideologies in its split form is addressed with a certain teetering folksy ingenuousness to the residents of a "hot dark future” that is definitely our fault but which is also extremely hard to defend or explain. In No Good Alternative, Vollmann has done a better job than anybody I’m aware of who has preceded him at demonstrating the legacy and profound value of James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Not glib, this is rather a writer who wants a literary language that does not unnecessarily alienate. Wen Stephenson's lightly chastising "Carbon Ironies," which curious readers can go espy over at The Baffler’s website, argues that Vollmann is a marvellous writer who has written a pair of volumes people ought to read, but that his position as a kind of defeated fatalist means he seems not to acknowledge that democracy and good citizenship require us to take action when it may only make a piddling difference…or maybe even none at all. Stephenson says it is too late for anything other than planetary calamity, but that we should be working on engineering very bad scenarios that are slightly less bad than the worst case scenarios. I think Vollmann would take this criticism seriously. I think he flirts with saying the same himself. A short chapter near the end of the second book entitled "What We Should Have Done" is a real tour de force and there isn’t anything at all that’s glib or facile about it. Vollmann’s preferred character type is I think the solitary scrounger tilting at windmills. The villains are the "regulated community," the bottom line business interests with their loathsome political bedfellows, utterly affronted by any obstacle that would presume to impede their spree. Vollmann would like nothing more than to see a way out of the chokehold and to his dismay he cannot. This is a sad story, a jug band blues. What essayist, activist, and tiresome public scold Rebecca Solnit wants from us solitary, impotent, and paralyzed loser inhabitants of unliveable reality when she calls us “lazy cynics” like there had ever been anything we could have done to appease this awful lady except to overturn the state of things like it were a dinner table…what she wants I surely do not know, but she always seems to look like the cat that swallowed the canary.

Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, 1970)

Neil Young, "Vampire Blues"