Holy Monstro

 

I would tell you in all earnestness that I’m sorry I hurt you but you are exceedingly lovely when you cry so I am of at least two minds. 

In 1816, when the sun barely shone for a year due to a volcanic winter triggered by the eruption of Mount Tambora on Sumbawa Island in Indonesia, the eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley was staying with her husband Percy, Lord Byron, and Dr. John Polidori at the Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva in Switzerland, where to beat the doldrums Byron challenged each of the others to come up with a gangbusters ghost story for the ages. Drugs and alcohol were definitely involved, but it is worth noting that Percy Shelly liked hash and laudanum but did not drink. In short order, Mary had a vivid dream featuring a "pale student of unhallowed arts" kneeling beside a hideous, reassembled humanoid being as it emerges torpidly back into a cursed condition of sentient awareness. Byron’s prompt and Mary’s dream were to prove the kernel from which the classic novel Frankenstein was to emerge. Bleak times? “It was the year 1816,” Paul West has Dr. Polidori muse in his sublime 1989 historical novel Lord Byron’s Doctor: “My life began then, and all else.”

Long before the theme park et cetera, Universal Studios set up shop in Southern California in 1915 when it built a studio lot in Universal City on land bought with prophetic good sense and no small amount of temerity by company honcho Carl Laemmle the previous year. One thing that Universal quickly learned and that no small number of small or micro ‘indie’ studios know very well to this day is that good horror movies are essentially cash cows because they are relatively cheap to make and can reliably be expected to pull in audiences everywhere. Universal had huge financial successes with a spate of atmospheric Gothic horror classics starring Lon “Man of a Thousand Faces” Chaney and born of classy intellectual property like The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925). Both Universal properties from 1931, Dracula and Frankenstein are not only among the most remarkable and innovative films of the early sound era, they also more or less singlehandedly saved Universal Studios from bankruptcy. Carl Laemmle Jr. bought the rights to Dracula after he saw a version adapted for the stage on Broadway. Instead of picking an actor with an existing contract at Universal, Carl Laemmle Jr. chose Bella Lugosi, star of the Broadway production. The iconic appearance of Boris Karloff in Frankenstein came at a cost. Karloff endured up to four hours of make-up every morning, and because his costume was so heavy and the lighting rigs so hot…he started to lose a considerable amount of weight. The lighting rigs in Classical Hollywood were so hot they could start fires (and did). Bella Lugosi famously downplayed Karloff's work in Frankenstein, qualifying that he considered Karloff primarily a "make-up artist" rather than a genuine actor steeped in the craft. 

What’s my deal? None. I have no deal to offer a living soul. I’m just sitting here with the kid from Ju-On attacking the back half of a day-old box of assorted Hoopla donuts. What makes me believe myself such an expert that I can go ahead and speak on behalf of the monsters? I woke up knowing of the horrors to come but I could do nothing. Cassandra, daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy, who was sentenced by Apollo to prophesy the truth and be believed by no one. “All our knowledge is derived from infidels,” Percy Shelly is declared to have boasted. 

The sea, the sea, the dark blue sea,

The bright, the pure, the ever free.

Edward John Trelawny on fair weather friend Percy Shelley: “barring drugs and accidents, he might have lived as long as his father—to ninety.” Trelawny believed that Shelley’s vessel was probably hijacked on the water and Shelley robbed and killed, or that it was a malicious ramming, an act of hot-headed caprice, the vessel’s occupant(s) in due course casualties of the sinking. What kind of monster was Percy Shelley? He was the best kind of spoiled, little brat. He wanted to have his cake and eat it too, turning the King’s England, all the while, into a foul open-air zoo. The angelic toddler who bangs on the table and proclaims its rancid epithets, servants running about in dismay and confusion. King baby and spoiled, little brat are not equivalent. King baby is all diapers, lung power, and demands, whereas spoiled, little brat will use intelligence and cunning to really and truly fuck shit up. When Percy Shelly wrote The Necessity of Atheism in 1811, not yet twenty, he knew what he was doing and he went ahead and did it, turning himself into a No-Go Zone for his whole family and all other members of polite society who’d formerly known him. 

Power, like a desolating pestilence,

Pollutes whate'er it touches, and obedience,

Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,

Makes slaves of men, and, of the human frame,

A mechanised automaton. 

The Cramps, "I Was a Teenage Werewolf"

Roky Erickson, "Two Headed Dog (Red Temple Prayer)"

Gwar, "Gor-Gor"

Top Five Con Artist Movies

What we professional liars hope to serve is truth. I'm afraid the pompous word for that is 'art.' Picasso himself said it. Art is a lie. A lie that makes us realize the truth.
- Orson Welles in F for Fake

Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce my 52 assistants. Notice the contrast of style and character. They range from ingratiating simplicity to regal splendour. Some are passive and inert, others brazen and belligerent. Some suicidal, just like you and me. But card artistry, just like other theatrical forms, music and dance, has its own styles, its own classics, its own genres.
- Ricky Jay in Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants (1996)

F for Fake (Orson Welles, 1973) 

Rien ne va plus (Claude Chabrol, 1997)

Abus de faiblesse (Catherine Breillat, 2013)

House of Games (David Mamet, 1987)

The Fortune (Mike Nichols, 1975)

John Zorn, Spy vs Spy: The Music of Ornette Coleman [Full Album] 

Two Sublime Eddie Cochran Covers from 1969

 

If you were a white rock and roll star in the 1950s the best way to demonstrate credibility and be a hardcore badass was to to die in an airplane or automobile crash. That’s what happened to Eddie Cochran in 1960 when the ascending earth angel entertainer died in a car accident at the age of twenty-one on the way to Heathrow Airport at the end of a successful UK tour. Witnesses to the accident describe Cochran throwing his body over his fiancée, songwriter Sharon Sheeley, to protect her during impact, perhaps in the process sealing his own fate. At the age of eighteen, in 1958, Sheeley wrote the hit “Poor Little Fool” for Ricky Nelson, which had the distinction of becoming the first number one hit on the inaugural Billboard Hot 100 chart. The sublime Eddie Cochran tune “Somethin' Else,” in all its pummelling sturm und drang commodity fetishism, peaked at #58 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1959 and was written by Sharon Sheeley and Eddie’s older brother Bob. My goodness, now doesn’t that just look like a Freudian case study if anything ever did? I can see it on the billboards now: Kane and Abel Vs. the Kustom Kar Kommandos.    

Flamin' Groovies, "Somethin' Else"

NRBQ, "C'mon Everybody"

Kierkegaard for Twinks

 

Last of the Red Hot Lovers (Gene Saks, 1972)

Some people like to have a good time and avoid rustling up any form of discomfort or conflict. These folks finesse in order to forestall a mess. There are two kinds of oversexed people, good sports and bad sports, and the kind of people I’m addressing are for the most part oversexed and good sports about it or trying their Sunday damndest to be. There are hot and cold lovers and everybody for the most part prefers a hot one because they are dependably fun and high-energy…at least when all’s going good. Hot water bottle lover, buried beneath weighted blankets, please and appease me, lover dear. In order to be the kind of person a whole bunch of other people can justify sleeping with, however, you need two primary characteristics and fun ain’t one of them: 1) you have to be low maintenance for extended periods of time; 2) you have to be good at agreeing with people, or at least appearing to, even when you don’t. We are handcuffed in this world when we stand on principle because even having principles at all immediately condemns us. What the people-pleasers and placaters of this world really and truly want is to shake you hysterically and yell incomprehensibly until you lose consciousness or are dead. When I was much younger, quite dashing, and occasionally sleeping with a few people at a time, I learned the most cloyingly obvious lesson more than a handful of times (because stubborn and selfish): other people have feelings too; stop pretending the world is your oyster, you aren’t even a property owner. When you lie to somebody and then are subsequently pleased with yourself for tricking them…that’s when you know it’s time to seek some form of council higher than your own. 

Once when I was a young man a slightly older woman put on fancy lingerie in an effort to startle and, you know, stimulate me, throwing me off pretty good as I entered the bedroom a touch tipsy and genuinely surprised. I figured I had better stand there and take it in as throughly as I could manage because I was absolutely certain that nobody else was ever going to do such a wonderful and harebrained thing for me again. Did I break that woman’s heart? Well, no, not then and there. As for what ultimately happened: I know for a fact that we both know that we were each culpable. Communication could bulldoze a better, less thorny path if people would stop putting themselves in the way of everything that isn’t them or their adopted lifestyle politic. Not even you are who you think you are. It’s a large part of why you dream. At no point or node along the fabled political spectrum is anybody practicing pattern recognition at all effectively. Not every synthesis is a solution and not every fool is worthy of a say in the matter. Convictions, stipulates Robert Anton Wilson, create convicts. When I defended my master’s thesis back in 2004, one of the auditing professors asked me what we are supposed to do if ‘politics’ is just another word for ‘division’ and there is no foreseeable stabilization in sight, and my answer was that we should interrogate our own presuppositions daily. In the town where nobody talks about anything, people get their feelings hurt all the time for no good goddamn reason. Or worse. That's part of how offenders become serial offenders. Sometimes I’m far too principled and I really lord it over people, but sometimes I’m pleasurable to be around, and that is largely because I tend to find new information much more exciting than I do threatening. This is another thing I share in common with ace French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. What’s got me most hooked in Art and Life is the capital-N New.

The sun is both the furnace and the forge. We are here on its leniency. We cannot understand the scale of the sun, which fuses in the neighbourhood of 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium every second. You can damage your eyes by looking directly at the sun but your imagination cannot do anything with the fusion of 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium every second or four million tons of solid matter being turned into pure energy every second. “The image of consolatory gestures,” writes Antoine Volodine in Radiant Terminus (a book whose title very much is an unsubtle reference to orgasm), “was overlaid with wanton images and sensations of skin, of flesh, of pawing, of masculine gropes, of possibly shared breaths, of tumbles on the bed, and urgent penetrations. The physical nostalgia of coupling, handed down over two hundred million animal years. He suppressed all this as best he could, this surge of salacious filth. But, in his consciousness and beyond it, the filth overflowed.” Maybe down there in the depths of the human orgasm is a little, flaming window into hell that doesn’t even really give you much of a picture of hell the same way we don’t currently have much of a mental picture of the sun. Is a mushroom cloud a cartoon parody of human orgasm? Is the joke at long last on us? This is of course the of age of porn stars with direct knowledge comparing the penis of the President of the United States of America to a mushroom. It sometimes really blows my mind how much online life today seems like an old J.G. Ballard story in living colour! 

One of my favourite lines from 21st century literary fiction comes to us care of the 2017 Javier Marías novel Berta Isla: “we never really know if someone has been harmed until their story is complete, and that takes time.” When the motion and commotion cease for a moment perhaps there’s a chance we’ll breathe. Life is a moving target and that’s how it sneaks up behind you and knifes you. With the right practice you’ll learn to stare at a dangling hood ornament for hours at a time. “This book owes its life to death,” concedes the great Hélène Cixous in 2016’s Death Shall Be Dethroned: Los, A Chapter, the Journal. The name Los connects both to loss and the Spanish definitive masculine article, but it also harkens back to William Blake for whom Los was the fallen or earthly form of Urthona, suggesting the inauguration of an archetypal trans identity, though one should be careful to grant to the prefix trans its full capabilities with respect to combination and passage, including but extending far beyond mere considerations of gender and sexuation. Cixous: “One doesn’t die. One comes and goes between two absences of memory.” In his book on his friend Hélène Cixous, H.C. for Life, That Is to Say…, Jacques Derrida ruminates on the eternal made available to mortal beings by cycles and substitutions, resorting even to biblical metaphor (both he and Cixous were/are Jewish), musing on the list of sequential Jonahs, one Jonah ever replacing another Johah in the forward march of time. Of course, if the triumph of life over death rests in the suspension of the centrality of the individual then the individual Jonah is no longer a thing of all that much cosmic significance or relevance, presumably, from even a research standpoint. 

The heavens. At long last. Unmade in spite of our gaze, the parallax of perspective stomach-churning. Bound notebooks, lockboxes, apartments, cities, the individual languages colloquially called tongues. Our arms protecting our chests like family crests. Everything is clutching itself in and fastening itself up in wait of whatever stage of entropy it is, as depicted in The Wizard of Oz, whereby that which was fastened steadily to the earth is fastened there no longer and anything of inconsiderable mass, such as yourself or your loved ones, goes flying off into the wild blue yonder with hardly a first whisper of complaint. 

The Soft Pink Truth, "Is It Gonna Get Any Deeper Than This? (Dark Room Mix)"

Lou Reed Vs. Bruce Springsteen

 

Curiouser and curiouser: I have but one solo Lou Reed record and but one Bruce Springsteen record. Obviously I also have John Cale's Paris 1919 but I have a bunch of John Cale stuff...

Lou Reed, "Caroline Says II"

Bruce Springsteen, "Highway Patrolman"

  * It is my belief that congenitally depressive people often find Lou Reed's Berlin comforting and reassuring.

Fame Formerly

 

Grande Dame Sarah Bernhardt
[1844-1923]

The author visits the Calgary Foot Care Nurses

At some point some time back I noticed a trend where Baby Boomers online were regularly bemoaning how young people today don’t know who the Beatles were or scoff openly at the notion that the Beatles could be of any lingering significance or value. Oh, I laugh too. Do any of you raving Beatlemania outpatients remember who Sarah Bernhardt was? Not one of you does…except for the guy who thinks I’m talking about sassy comedienne Sandra Bernhard. No, Sarah Bernhardt was the most famous actor or actress on planet earth in the period directly before cinema. She died, in point of fact, before the cinema could grow up enough to do anything meaningful with her. Today, our imagination’s portrait of her could only ever be hazy and scant of resource. 

Tallulah Bankhead, the sophisticated and frank Broadway legend revered the world over by gay men who dig theatre and gossip, in some ways followed in the path of grande dame Sarah Bernhardt, almost entirely eschewing appearance in motion pictures in order to continue mining the great yawning ineffable from up from under stage lights before a rapt live audience. Tallulah’s best movie is popularly believed to be Alfred Hitchcock’s wartime pressure-cooker Lifeboat (1944) in which it can indeed be observed that the great stage actress knows how to have the right wry sort of fun with unambiguously silly make-believe in a way that the camera itself cannot help but assiduously enjoy. That is the main difference between cinema and theatre: in the cinema you are playing the whole thing to one audience member and the audience member in question happens to be filming you. 

Geraldine Page was likewise the biggest and most highly touted actress in all mythological New York City once upon a fabled time, but the movies rarely seemed up to doing us much help in remembering her from the remote and occluded hilltop of the transglobal global present. (The Internet was the Tower of Babel all along.) Do yourself a favour if you’ve never seen the film and swallow your pride and check out Woody Allen’s uncharacteristically heavy 1978 Chekhov/Bergman mashup Interiors in which Page gives as ruthless, festering, darkly humorous, and aggressively exposed a performance as any ever before captured on celluloid. The only performance that truly makes it as performance is the performance that achieves true insanity, argues the boisterously lounging Mick Jagger in Performance (1970). Well, okay, if that’s what you’re after, you Theatre of Cruelty geeks, I would advise you to take a look at and very seriously consider Geraldine Page. I believe this gig just might be her living destiny. 

Part of what is not only noteworthy but outright historic about the unique celebrity of Charlie Chaplin, the cherubic itinerant tramp with the toothbrush moustache and mesmerizing balletic feats, was that his was the first mechanically reproduced face to be seen by and to have become recognizable to people from everywhere in the world you could take a projector. In a sense, if you really take the requisite time to consider it, Charlie Chaplin is much more like one interchangeable bottle of Coca-Cola or another than you or I will ever be. 

Tallulah Bankhead on the set of Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944)

Interiors (Woody Allen, 1978)

The 2026 Beth Orton

A handwritten prompt from the expedient beetle-beaked drones down in Arts and Entertainment. Ahem, achoo, as-salamu alaykum. Is it just me or can we all agree that fifty-five-year-old 2026 Beth Orton is a seamless meld of Marianne Faithfull and Stuart A. Staples that goes down like a nice woody and maybe sort of cinnamony single malt of most distinguished vintage?   

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Beth Orton, "Waiting" 
[Live in the Studio]