Threepenny Oppenheimer Pt. 2

The Dick Gibson Show and The Franchiser strike me, who is always approximately me, as the most noble and surpassingly emblematic novels of the great Jewish-American literary lion Stanley Elkin, who struggled with and worked through lifelong chronic illness, as they are the most boastfully crass and single-minded yet open-armed and warm in their pursuit of shuck-and-jive American hucksterism lingo and bravura, almost recognizable from the pages of Sinclair Lewis except that Elkin’s peerless pursuit of finessed language and form first pays homage to and then surpasses Saul Bellow. Arriving directly after The Franchiser, The Living End is a long novella or short novel in three discreet parts, presented as a “triptych,” each piece originally published in a separate journal, concerning death, passage to the afterlife, and what happens after you get there, either on the winning or losing side, may God help you. The Living End begins with Ellerbee, liquor store proprietor, his enterprise repeatedly victim to “burly, hopped-up and armed deprivators, ski-masked, head-stockinged,” his finances top tier boondoggle, his luck sure as shot on all the working gauges. He’s supporting the families of his fallen-in-battle clerks: there is George’s widow, and then there is the comely, red-headed Dorothy Register, now de facto single mother in her early twenties, her husband Harold a quadriplegic vegetable. And after all is said and done there is Ellerbee’s charming but mean-spirited wife May. Ellerbee has decided he is going to sell the liquor store to the strong-arm syndicate that's been making depreciating offers, a syndicate he suspects is robbing him and shooting his employees. Kind, unselfish Ellerbee gets approved for a loan and buys a new liquor store, High Spirits, the real estate upmarket, a better neighbourhood…like where he and his wife used to lived, before their house burnt down. The grey market syndicate robs the store and shoots Ellerbee dead. When Ellerbee asks the angel of death if there is an afterlife, the angel of death says “Oh boy.” Heaven, it turns out, seems pretty inclusive, colourfully nondenominational. There are mosques, cathedrals, and synagogues. Heavenly choir, pearly gates, ambrosia, manna, harp-plucking angels, halos. It’s all there for the soul to behold. Ellerbee meets Saint Peter and Saint Peter with gleeful sadism banishes Ellerbee to hell for no reason. Elkin, on the beam, Jackson: “Hell was the ultimate inner city. Its stinking sulphurous streets were unsafe. Everywhere Ellerbee looked he saw atrocities. Pointless, profitless muggings were commonplace; joyless rape that punished its victims and offered no relief to the perpetrator. Everything was contagious, cancer as common as cold, plague the quotidian. There was stomachache, headache, toothache, earache. There was angina and indigestion and painful third-degree burning itch. Nerves like hideous body hair grew long enough to trip over and lay raw and exposed as live wires or shoelaces that had come undone.” There is nobody sinless enough to get to heaven and no this is not a dream. Does not God’s own bitterness and indulgence read sinful to you, dear reader? What of his apocalyptic wrath?! And what of ill-used Jesus, hands crippled by nails such that they cannot any longer form fists? Life doesn’t stop dying, maestro, and it doesn’t stop living either. Paradiso, Purgatorio, Inferno. Death is wasted on us. We don’t seem to learn anything.

Along with the painter Albrecht Dürer, argues Fernand Hallyn in his book The Poetic Structure of the World: Copernicus and Kepler, Kepler believed that the organic unity of man and the celestial realm “is based on number.” Hallyn has the harmonic correspondences of whole and part, genus and species, operative at any number of levels, existing in a homogenous Euclidean space and corresponding to the introduction of synecdoche into truth and method, which supplants simpler metaphors of mimesis. Ultimately, Copernicus had believed his system was superior to Ptolemy’s not because of his own superiority with mathematical calculations—with number—but rather because Ptolemy’s system was not “sufficiently pleasing to the mind,” a statement that cannot help but suggest aesthetic rather than mathematical criteria. Copernicus additionally finds his astronomy more satisfactory because he believes it represents a more enlightened way of relating to God. In writing about the sun, Copernicus demonstrates “lyricism and proliferation of devices such as the rhetorical question, enumeration, asyndeton, metaphor, and comparison.” His bottom-up concentric/vertical cosmology evokes Dante’s Divine Comedy. Placement of an altar in a church, a matter of the situation of symbols or signifiers within a composite symbolic order, is a major issue of Copernicus’s day, running parallel to the questions Copernicus is asking himself regarding how to situate celestial bodies in terms of one another, with the sun, of course, now central. He keeps God primary, but he deviates from Copernicus, presenting new ways of conceptualizing man’s relation to God and the heavens, Hallyn arguing that these developments indicate the heliocentric revolution’s Mannerist turn. Kepler emerges in the context of 17th century arguments concerning whether or not symmetry is a necessary precondition for beauty. Tycho Brahe doesn’t believe the heliocentric universe constitutes legitimate symmetry, whether it is “pleasing” or not. Johannes Kepler’s cosmology is one of perverse ellipses and all manner of confounding motion, appropriate to his own historical epistemic and its space-time. Visual aesthetics are always transmissible across demarcated lines and elements imported from rhetoric and literature find themselves intertextually interpolated into Kepler also. Kepler says of music that it is “a construction […] so rational and natural that God the Creator has impressed it upon the relations of the celestial movements.” His equations establishing the harmonic relations of planets were subsequently transcribed into musical notation. For Robert Fludd, another Mannerist esoteric, the monochord is the central organizing symbol of cosmology, equivalent to the sphere in Kepler. A dazzling autobiographical passage of writing from Kepler, cited by Fernand Hallyn: “This man was born with the destiny of devoting much time to difficult things that are repulsive to others. In his childhood, he undertook versifying before the proper age. He attempted to write comedies, chose the longest psalms to learn by heart…. In poetry, he tried first to write acrostics and anagrams…. He then undertook the most difficult of diverse lyrical genres; he wrote Pindaric verses, dithyrambs. He embraced unusual subjects [such as] the sun’s repose, the source of rivers, a view of Atlantis through the clouds. He delighted in enigmas, searched out the most subtle figures of speech; he amused himself with allegories, wove the tiniest details into them and even teased them by the hair…” In 1608, Kepler writes a dizzying bit of speculative theory—framing it as a dream, this being an ever-reliable literary device for throwing the hounds off your scent—in which he imagines astrology as it might be practiced by a person situated on the surface of the moon. 

The Trigger Effect (David Koepp, 1996)

The Strange Case of Angelica (Manoel de Oliveira, 2010)

It used to be much more common that you would hear wise and distinguished writers, like those dragged out and tarted-up in Donald Hall's Old Poets: Reminiscences and Opinions, advise young aspiring writers wondering how it's all done that anybody who can tell a joke properly can write a story. Right, but whose properly are we talking about here, hmmm? Your properly told story might just look an awful lot to me like damage to my personal property. You could sue them for libel, Jennifer Juniper, on account of clear and quantifiable damage to earning power, but you've been walking the streets for years wearing a big ridiculous placard that says you don't want no bullshit Rotarian earning power or something like that, mmm. First you make your bed and then you leap on it, Jennifer Juniper. Is it true that you only feel like you have power when you've tapped all the power from the city and its huddled, shivering citizenry? Do you remember The Trigger Effect starring Elisabeth Shue? It's about a serious blackout and how short a time it takes for nothing whatsoever to work anymore after you've noticed some of them maybe aren't working quite right. I honestly used to think I could survive a nuclear war if I just sat it out drinking bourbon and watching movies, but this was never what I was ultimately aspiring to. Everybody in grad school who knew me at all well knew that my plan for after was to pump gas and write poems and make love, living hard until I couldn't take it anymore, hopefully having some kind of modest success with the writing at some point and ultimately retiring to a quiet place in the country, hopefully with a wife, where I could execute my patented razzmatazz with heightened lucidity and sensible time-management. There used to be a lot of middle aged men on the prairie who took that long to find their ass and set up shop. I should run for sheriff. A woman I did not love but with whom I was for a good while regularly intimate once told me that I was a hard person to love, and I told her that she was only saying that because I was being an absolute piece of shit in that present moment. Are you excusing yourself? she asked. I wouldn't know how to restrain me! I like fairly vanilla sex because I am reticent to turn myself into a circus act...again. "I did not deceive myself for a moment as to the way," writes Nietzsche in Ecce Homo, "sea, danger—and success!" Well, a Wagnerian naval fleet would very much not be my scene and I am not at present time in anything like my prime, no sir. "I could maybe hold my Claire for a little while," writes Ben Marcus in his fantastic 2012 novel The Flame Alphabet, "hold her so tight that perhaps it would not hurt so much when together we landed in the world below." 

Donovan, "Jennifer Juniper"

  

    

My Favourite Punk Rock Tune of the 1990s

The Makers, "Leopard Print Sissy"

Threepenny Oppenheimer Pt. 1

 

“Sense,” writes the great Gilles Deleuze in his jaw-dropping 1969 whopper The Logic of Sense, a book we might call an innovation in a field named Transcendental Structuralism that it also inaugurates, “is exactly the boundary between propositions and things.” Naturally, Deleuze is compelled to follow logic to the boundary places and see what its skin wears on the outside—perhaps millions of little rhinoceros horns—the part of language worn on the outside of language but not strictly extrinsic to language, a place where it abandons propositions and things and has only free-floating sensors and morphic sense, a nonsense, perhaps, which is the only sense. Antonin Artaud, the schizo-gnostic machinist, Félix Guattari and transversal “infra-sense.” Before the schizo, however, the pervert is king and the logic of sense his lair. The pervert escapes the neurosis and interpersonal paralysis of the everyday on one side of the plank and the depths of psychosis and dissolution on the other, like Chaplin in Modern Times or Tati in Playtime. What is The Logic of Sense, Deleuze's self-admitted attempt to give structural semiotics its transcendental [i.e. Kantian] philosophy, but a perversion of structuralism and a bit of a pugilist’s broadside or bromide? Politics is like trying to screw a cat in the ass, said one famous creep in a faraway land called Los Angeles County, long, long ago, but Deleuze is the one major 20th century thinker we can imagine giving the proposition some serious thought. Perhaps we might even take a page out of the book of Deleuze-commentator David Lapoujade and declare the bold and ennobling pervert a connoisseur of aberrant movements within structure. The pervert prevails proud only so long as data fails to upload to the cloud. From Structuralism to Silicon, from “what does it mean?” to “how does it work?” and then back again, roundelay and turnstiles, the relationship with depth gradually changes, as in Herman Melville, the nonsense of the depths that are deployed at the surface according to the intensive variations of the body without organs. Somebody in Paris asked me if there is an easy way to explain the body without organs and I told her that when she dreams the body she has and uses in her dreams doesn’t have any organs. The photogenic and always available face of the earth itself has been remodelled in the image of smooth moon-like scarcity and oblivion, “a kind of postmortem ground,” and, by the end of the 60s, with those Paris cops dressed up as actual Martians swinging their bang-bang clubs, the One-Many as Infinite Multiplicity becomes run through with “inclusive disjunctions” and pockets of ungodly bad harmony…the fantasia of black holes. The acute schizophrenic is always a perfectly functional transmitter/receiver, although to mislabel the schizo a pervert would be to add far too aristocratic a gloss, I should imagine, to the ransacked worldly toil of the former.  

Modern Times (Charles Chaplin, 1936)

Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)

One time I was talking with a musician I know in town who is also a bookworm and an athletics nut and he asked me about Robert Coover’s 1968 novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., its being about baseball, sort of, and authored by a writer my very high regard for whom was already known to my interlocutor from previous chats and neighbourly seed-chewin’. When I actually thought for a moment about how to tackle the query, it suddenly dawned on me that The Universal Baseball Association, only his second of twenty-one novels, is also the only one in the Coover corpus entire that strongly resembles something Harry Mathews might write. It’s what I thought in the moment and it’s what I said, by God. My musician associate was justifiably surprised to hear me make this curious claim for the perfectly sound reason that Harry Mathews is connected by discursive habit to Paris, France’s Oulipo laboratory and Bob Coover, only two years his junior, to American Postmodernism Inc. So here is the thing: in order to write The Universal Baseball Association, Coover needed to invent a fantasy baseball league that made sense and that you could theoretically operate in real life, put all that stuff in the main character’s head, and then also plot a coherent whirlpool-type narrative around it. Something analogous happens in Mathews’ significantly later masterpiece The Journalist, from 1994: a psychotherapist encourages the narrator to start journaling for the therapeutic value it may provide in the aftermath of a mental health event, only for the journaling to become so obsessive and specified that complex systems of collation gradually enter the picture, leading in kind to cross-referencing, column manipulation, variable fonts, and special paginating. In novels like these the characters seem to be doing all of the novelist’s work for them, but they definitely are not. A big, weird job like this, with a zillion little moving pieces like a model train passing through a tiny elaborate war zone, you take on only because you want a big, weird job to set your teeth into and have at. What is it in the end that I love so much about Bob Coover of Iowa, U.S.A.? I keep waiting for him to pull up in his blue Studebaker truck and take me to go get a root beer float and play Fat Boys on the Wurlitzer. And though the scouts may presuppose them in opposing camps, dumb in all the currently relevant faculties as it is their plight to be right this very night, falling asleep in their hosiery, I know I see the influences of Coover and Mathews both bubbling up with some regularity in the cauldron of my own creative spell-castings. Hey, boys, I greet the two of them, running a cloth quickly over my face. You’ll be happy to hear the robins are still guarding the tree!  

L'Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962)

Vagabond (Agnès Varda, 1985)

Coming out of high school, I applied to four or five universities and got into two of them. I applied to the film program at Ryerson but that was not one of the two, alas, as getting accepted there would have pushed me more in a film production than a film theory direction. That’s fate, dawg, so now you have to listen to me talk about Lacan while I pick my misshapen nose in my stained Tallulah Bankhead hoodie. As part of my application to Ryerson, I sent in a treatment for a possible student film, which ended up being about an anonymous backpacker who enters a mountain village only to find it completely abandoned. Naturally, I stipulated that this all-but-silent film was to be shot in high contrast black and white.  

The Necks, Hanging Gardens [Full Album]

The John Wayne Trial Unabridged

The Millarville Racing and Agricultural Society Times-Gazette sent your intrepid reporter and gallant lad-about-the-place to the trial of cowboy actor John Wayne, who smokes constantly and mutters like an overgrown toddler in need of a throttling and a talking to. Perhaps I was forged in a more traditional and less compromised furnace. Who, sir or madame, is to say?

Here are some of the things I saw in the hour leading up to the trial of disgraced cowboy actor and known war apologist John "If That is Your Real Name" Wayne: soldiers drinking tea next to artillery; a journalist working studiously on that day's crossword; clipboard busybodies busily busy at their business; the big stentorian judge and his mighty quivering jowl, the whole package fresh from the gardens of Luxembourg. Enter legal council, choir, children of war torn and also famine-ravaged Cosumel, the district attorney's suicide blonde mistress who also works for him, and then finally armed Zapatista women to cover the perimeter.

Moustaches now cease to writhe, ye heathen horde, in their ubiquitous suspicion and disdain. The man behind me says: "Give these motherfuckers a trampoline and some turpentine and they go and try to put over a three-ring circus like this was Duck Soup or the Skull and Bones society."

"Shut it with the chatter, harpies," says the seven-foot bailiff with the hairlip and his hands on his hips. "Go outside and clutch your prayer beads down in the gravel with God pummelled to incognizant dust if you can't stop openly bleating." 

A slow and perhaps drugged fly buzzes out the in door.

We should be above trials and such. Can you dig it? This is a time-consuming activity!

The cowboy actor John Wayne enters in his workaday chains, a little sheepish, hat in his hands...except for his having no hat. Behold, good people, the toddler chastened!

A long time passes.

Shelling has started up again nearby and artillery near the courthouse is being fired at a solid tempo. Buildings shed brick like dandruff. God the Insensible, long may he thunder and roar in the divine downpour!  

When all the audience has left John Wayne looks bereft, like he knew he'd caused that himself with his bitterness, cigarettes, and grotty lowborn heft. Mr. Wayne turned to the judge and said: "Please, whatever you do, just don't characterize me as a militant, 'cause that would make me plain sick." He added: "There can't be no matter of there being any jury of my peers; don't nobody know the trouble I've seen."

Some ranchers and young folk come in because they think it's a bar...apologize...leave...

Suddenly my dear Reba runs in and she's proper liquored and no I damn well cannot believe it, but she is screaming presently the following to my awe and astonishment: "John Wayne, you cheap, cheatin' two-bit half-assed cowboy-actin' bastard, you owe me and little Jim alimonies. If you keep having second thoughts it's over, lard ass, and look at me, a prize horse's ass, 'cause you didn't even have the dadblasted brainpower sufficient to so much as try and seduce me." 

The district attorney's mistress goes by and I get a curious chill up my spine. She's built like a jackhammer. A grim thought flashes through my head: the next lunch break is permanent.

The judge: "Very illuminating, but I hardly manage to see how..."

Part of a helicopter crashes through the ceiling of the courthouse. "Who brought the reefer?" quips some wag two rows behind me.

Asked for any final words, the disgraced and now convicted cowboy actor John Wayne complains in grief that it was never any more a case of his having thrown away his badge in order to confront the authorities and the powers that be than it was a contrary gesture meant to antagonize the outlaws who to a man overestimated the extent to which "the Duke" was handcuffed to the badge.

In an interview from prison, incarcerated former cowboy star John Wayne, who works in the commissary, said the following to me personally: "I loved Reba very much, I think, and I wasn't yanking her chain or anything. I fucked it up very badly but also she became irritating to me, slowly and progressively until my last goddamn nerve had had it. She became much less desirable every time she spoke. You didn't find that? I get jealous and suspicious and paranoid. On occasion. She'd then poke at me like I were the proverbial bear. I'm not going to lie, I hit her a few times. In the mouth, the stomach. One of my things is I can't stand to let somebody leave a room so...uh...I could never let her, you know, leave a room. I wouldn't even let her go to the bathroom alone. I was sure one of us was going to kill the other at some point, like a basic and crude law of nature, but that never did happen. Haw haw. Wheel of life! Sheesh."

Oh my God, I cannot believe this, don't look now, but that same guy is still working on that fucking crossword puzzle...

Can, "Nineteen Century Man"

The Xennial Kid of De Winton, Alberta

 

Popularized by gadabout Vancouver author Douglas Coupland at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, “Generation X” as a concept originally referred I believe to a kind of renegade-but-cosmopolitan postmodern drop-out mentality but can more properly be understood as a term bandied about by advertisers faced with a new generation of young people to whom it seemed impossible to figure out how to sell the mandated trinkets, toys, toaster ovens, and mediated experiences. The standard metric would have us hold that the benighted citizens of Generation X are folks who were born in the precious pink-and-purple-and-blue-hewed spatiotemporal window extending from 1965-1980. Born in November of 1979, I was about as late on this particular scene as it was possible to arrive. When the weird, creepy, brazenly blasé but ultimately a-little-too-controversial-for-the-bottom-line Calvin Klein porno-chic adds with the wood panel walls came out and got their fangs in our brainstems, I was fifteen years old, encamped out at the acreage, breathing it all in…listening to “Zurich is Stained” by Pavement, perhaps, or “Smothered in Hugs” by Guided by Voices. Whether you were an odd kid, an art kid, a jock, queer, a ufology kid, a Vans sneakers punk-rock slobberer, or a social nullity, it was very important in the last half of the 90s that you not ever show any sign that you cared about others or about yourself, but instead of in the ‘80s Gordon Gekko “greed is good” mode popular with coke heads, real estate agents, and libertarian-leaning American conservatives, what we were looking at in the 90s was the spectre of the universal teenager all in black, witnessing an atrocity, blinking quickly for effect, and then making a derisive wisecrack. Or maybe in the end just the opening line of Gregg Araki’s The Doom Generation, from the same year as those aforementioned Calvin Klein adds, simply Rose McGowan at some kind of club or rave, practically spitting out the word “fuck.” As trouble and chance reign and adjustments must be made, some commentators and specialists have zeroed in on a small, roughly and unevenly spackled generation—a veritable island of misfit toys—which is to say the Xennial cohort, neither properly X nor Y, and the current metric has us very squirrely denizens who were born between 1977 and 1983 to be sole residents in current standing of Arthur Lee’s house that is not a motel, where we trip balls and bypass them shopping malls. My sister and I mostly get along really well, but if you take us as case subject Xennials we do bear testament to the fact that the older sibling may tend to be a little more X and the younger one a little more Y. For example, I don’t think my sister is likely to remember the opening line of The Doom Generation. But we both promise to try our best to remember your pronouns!

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (Larry Roemer, 1967)

Love & Peace (Sion Sono, 2015)

Love, "A House is Not a Motel"

Twenty-Five Great Sports Movies [in Chronological Order]

A ball bat is a wondrous weapon.

- Ty Cobb

Quinn remembered the gentlemen, the women too, stopping in their green sportsman's kingdom to consider a series of rhetorical questions put to them by the boozy couple. The strange fact was that because Stanton at seventeen stayed sober, the deteriorated pair felt he was trying to be superior, to be condescending. And until the time they threw him out of the house to go to college, they skulked around and drank on the sly.
- Thomas McGuane, The Sporting Club

The Calgary Stampede (Herbert Blaché, 1925)

College (Buster Keaton, 1927) 

Horse Feathers (Norman Z. McLeod, 1932)

The Set-Up (Robert Wise, 1949)

The Lusty Men (Nicholas Ray, 1952)

Pit Stop (Jack Hill, 1969)

The Longest Yard (Robert Aldrich, 1974)

The Bad News Bears (Michael Ritchie, 1976)

Slap Shot (George Roy Hill, 1977)

A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness (Seijun Suzuki, 1977)

Youngblood (Peter Markle, 1986)

Bull Durham (Ron Shelton, 1988)

Eight Men Out (John Sayles, 1988)

The Cyclist (Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1989)

A Scene at the Sea (Takeshi Kitano, 1991)

The Cutting Edge (Paul Michael Glaser, 1992)

Up and Down (Luc Moullet, 1993)

Hoop Dreams (Steve James, 1994)

Tokyo Fist (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1995)

Shaolin Soccer (Stephen Chow, 2001)

Throw Down (Johnnie To, 2004)

Everybody Wants Some!! (Richard Linklater, 2016)

I, Tonya (Craig Gillespie, 2017)

The Witches of the Orient (Julien Faraut, 2021)

Afternoons of Solitude (Albert Serra, 2024)

The Fall, "Theme from Sparta F.C."