Jep Fowler's Easter Sermon

 

It's already been a year alright. What more could the year possibly want with us? What in tarnation are the folks out there zombie-walking through their routine with dead grey eyes actually pontificating at? Do they think? They are all driving 30 km/h on the 50 km/h roads. I continually holler obscenities and libels and can only hope the Good Sovereign Lord might forgive a feeble old amateur lost in a word whose condition is Maya, the infinite labyrinth with moving parts and the great many occluding veils also. A world where nothing is any longer set down where it once was. Dementia has no choice. It is called after and called for. Has the little organ in the brain that does critical thinking atrophied at the scale of civilization itself...incomprehensible though troubling is this notion of civilization because it is an abstract concept and anybody can do any damn ring-a-ding thing they want to with it, like the white nationalist eugenicist Europeans who went to South America believing they would be White Gods ruling over a Divine Kingdom and who would mainly just go mad and die in the jungles, sort of like the colony collapse syndrome depicted a little ways into Terrence Malick's unconscionably lengthy New World (2005). Does everybody here today remember the story of Job as related in the Bible? Job goes through unimaginable suffering, right? Why? God has to prove a point to a rogue angel. So what does that mean? It means Job has to go through the very worst suffering that God is able to visit upon him. It's the absolute summit of suffering. What is being tested? The insanity and stupidity of Job's faith in God. This is the ultimate point of the rogue angel. The people around him and the broader general public assumed that the unspeakably awful nature of the punishment inflicted upon him by God meant Job had to have done something of the very worst order, although we don't have much evidence of the conjectures that were floating about back then, clandestine as such matters have a grievous tendency to be. I believe God saw a transformation in Job and believed it had all been for the better, as this was a much-humbled spiritual supplicant who had become much better at discussing his feelings in detail and who could withstand the intense pressures of extended solitude with relative ease. Grist for the therapy mill. Hey, don't knock it until you've tried it. Everybody in a desperate condition of economic precarity, living paycheck to paycheck or much, much worse, is one catastrophic planetary event away from becoming a flesh-eating zombie of the genre movie variety. Also, it's naturally worth considering what the collapse of electrical grids will do to people and other organisms. Will it be like the decompression and disequilibrium of the zombie office-denizens with suits stumbling through hallways en masse late in Godard's Alphaville (1965)? Will it be like Don DeLillo's short and swift 2020 novel The Silence? All I can say is yikes. So much for majestic vistas, folks. My final thought for this year's Easter sermon: you want a conscientious rather than a sadistic and unseemly executioner because, for one thing, you want him to do the actual severing of the head smoothly and without issue...and you certainly don't want him drawing the thing out unnecessarily for his own aberrant amusement. 

ESG, "Dance"

[This is probably my most exciting used record find
so far this year.] 

High School Graduation, 1997

 

A Few Sacrilegious Words

The ethically elected ego is both already obligated and never sufficiently obligated, and such is the very structure of time.

- Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other

The social world human beings think they know is set up and maintained by connivance, manipulation, and craven self-seeking. The mad are not bad because they are bad or because they are mad, but rather because there is no easeful entering into communion with highly abnormal people and so they may tend to get on the commoner’s nerves. “My temperament was not much suited to socialization,” confesses trans artist and writer Paul B. Preciado in their book Can the Monster Speak?: Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts, finding succour and filiation instead in books like those written by “Giordano Bruno or Galileo” that “put an end to geocentrism.” For Preciado the next horizon of sacred upheaval is the logical, heteronormative binary apparatus which saturates mainstream culture and psychoanalysis both; it also seems to make all kinds of decent everyday people impatient and hostile, often out of the blue, the words out of their mouths an oil slick of ick. When I started smoking cannabis as a young man I remember that that particularly amiable and agreeable psychoactive-psychedelic plant suddenly gave me the belief that I could explain myself clearly and as simply as possible instead of becoming hostile, belligerent, and reactionary. This method has worked in fits and starts and largely depends on set, setting, and sufficient cooperation from man, beast, and utmost higher power. Our problem is that communication is dead and it’s us who put it coldly to bed. That the dying thing is forever going to die while looking death in the eye and calling it all a crackpot conspiratorial lie. Why do people want to live forever? Inertia and dumb hope. A Hungarian philosophy professor I had back in the Carleton days would regularly remind us of Deleuze’s assertion that the only question the philosophical supplicant really needs to find a way to answer is what can I hope for? It’s true, but only if you are a bourgeoisie and only if you aren’t flung out of society for reasons that have never been properly explained to you. In the near future all of us are going to have to start acting a lot more like Japan has done after the total collapse of its economy, slow and ugly, throughout the 1990s. A few years ago I chatted at dinner with a business executive in the oil and natural gas sector, though energy diversification is the full-on mandate now, who had just returned from Japan and told me that he honestly thinks Western business interests need to look at Japan as the only salient model out there for zero-growth economic sustainability. (He didn’t say anything about the birthrate concerns.) I accepted this as exciting, even emboldening news. And I definitely hadn’t been expecting it. People surprise you.

Hopper

Dean

Though he was married five times and probably had lots of experiences none of us could even fathom, it seems to me that the person for whom actor, art collector, photographer, and filmmaker Dennis Hopper most pined was his friend James Dean, the meteoric movie star who died young in an automobile wreck which was something the rock musicians were doing a lot back then but not so much the movie people (R.I.P. Jayne Mansfield). From Dean’s death in 1955 to his own in 2010, Hopper spent a lot of time talking in interviews about Dean and their sordid goings-on. They ran with a crew, and there isn’t any doubt they were thugs every bit as much as they were actors/artists. I remember one interview where Hopper chuckles about how reckless and insane Dean’s Nietzsche phase became. There are implications of bisexuality and bondage play. I’m not sure James Dean figures here at all, but in a couple of interviews with Dennis Hopper I have heard him reminisce upon the discovery and influence of Saint Thomas—A.K.A. ‘Doubting’ Thomas—and especially of two core precepts: never tell a falsehood and never do anything you don’t want to do. If Dennis Hopper can live to seventy-four on that shit, saltines, and filtered water then you can too.

Pierre Guyotat

A core part of the legend of the queer French writer Pierre Guyotat, who died in 2020, is the beat-sheet or branlante, short pornographic writings Guyotat composed as a teenager in order to get himself off. Here we have yet another great instance where I have walked the same path as a great literary lion operating at the most refined frequency of existence even before I’d so much as heard of the piker. This will explain for some the title of the opening track off my album Yevgenia. You may not be surprised to hear that my beat-sheets tended at least a little toward sadism, gothic dungeons, and torn bodices, slashers with black gloves. I never wanted to do any harm to anybody but my heart craved dirty, salacious, freeform fun. Nothing causes me nearly so much displeasure and concern as the pain of a creature whose pain is immediate and the swell of which short-circuits my hardware and takes me out at the knees. The swoon of romantic love has nothing on the swoon of violence and premeditated terror. I had the advantage of seeing some very awful things when I was younger such that I, Self-Will-Run-Riot (the only teacher I’m taking on is me), crossed a whole bunch of things off the list early and never even had to try them. Beyond the zone of interest is the refugee camp you never thought you’d need. One of the last major works Pierre Guyotat completed before his death, Idiocy, brought to North America by New York Review Books last year, is an autofiction recounting the period of time Guyotat spent in Algeria with the military when he was still very young and inexperienced. A grim, absurdist fable with no small amount of dry deadpan humour: labelled a dissident shortly after arriving in Algeria, Guyotat was placed in prison soon thereafter, where he’d spend the bulk of his compulsory service. “I, who have dreamed since puberty of brothels overflowing with the seed of melancholy captive adolescents, of the adult patrons who delight in it,” muses the Pierre Guyotat of Idiocy, “and of the male-on-male couplings their seed excites and lubricates? Nothing, as of yet, and nothing for a long time still: at most, a few sacrilegious words, whose mere utterance to myself annuls their organic reality." 

Le corbeau (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1943)

Late Winter

It’s a wintry day

I sit on a horse, frozen,

along with my shadow.

- Matsuo Bashō

Hazy Transmission from Southeast Calgary

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The Kinks, "I'll Remember"

Two Photos and Some Mississippi Delta Blues

 

Downtown Calgary 

at about 13:00 

on the First of April, 2026

Today I did some retail therapy

bought a new, perfectly simple but stylish/attractive ensemble

although the pants feel a bit like being inside a circus tent;

I think I look maybe a little like a combination of

Maggie Cheung in In the Mood for Love (2000)

and Ben Gazzara in Saint Jack (1979)

Charlie Patton, "Shake It and Break It"

No, fam, it ain't just your steam-powered imagination(s)

this 1929 platter by the great guitar-swallowing delta master

consists of Patton bragging for the entire duration of the song

about the strength and durability of his member 

Rock and Roll Bulletin

 

Today I was so happy and touched to receive the new, gorgeous reissue of the 1994 Versus album The Stars Are Insane from Teen Beat that I wept briefly and then performed a tobacco ceremony.  

Versus, The Stars Are Insane (Full Album)

Barbara Loden and Wanda

 

Wanda (Barbara Loden, 1970)

Barbara Loden promoting Wanda on The Dick Cavett Show (1971)

Wanda, the lone feature film starring and directed by New York stage actress Barbara Loden who was famous for being married to Elia Kazan but was herself a radiant source of pure golden light, was released in 1970 and somehow created a ripple in the fabric of space-time the implications of which are not yet at all clear. I had a friend a few decades my senior who originated from the Bronx and he once told me that when Loden starred in the Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s After the Fall in 1964 nearly the whole city of New York was astonished and agog. Nobody had ever had what she appeared to have, whatever the blazes it was. Barbara Loden has impassively produced some acolytes whose devotion is like that of the great monumentalists of past centuries and of other cultures (their legacy nowhere more firmly established in modernity than in the cumulative cinematic-hermeneutic complexitive monument of Japanese master Kenji Mizoguchi, whom none are likely to surpass). French writer Nathalie Léger has crafted a fine and fascinating document about potentially fatal arts and culture obsessions with her cult book Suite for Barbara Loden. The author is on a grand mission but any personal growth she undergoes is conducted in baby steps, micromillimeters. “What is it that attracts me so to Wanada?” poses Léger, before proceeding as one would were one so-to-speak flexing: “I have never been homeless, I have never abandoned my children, I have never given over my existence or even my financial affairs to any man, I don’t think I have ever entrusted even the most banal area of my life to anyone.” People with high standards seem always to be disproportionately blind to the personal side of their personal conundrums (and I myself stand guilty as charged, lest there be doubt). I know why I love the character Wanada much more and with greater burning intensity than I could ever love the actress and director Barbara Loden, who would doubtlessly leave me speechless in an encounter, and not only because she’s long dead. The reason for this is that using methods not entirely clear on the face of it, Wanada emerges for me as a close personal friend or member of the extended family. My favourite thing about the motion picture Wanda is for sure the character Wanda. I grin wide at her on my widescreen television as she makes her messy hair do funny stuff when she swings her neck and her eye(s). Loden was a sophisticated fellow traveler of the New York underground and avant-garde circles. She studied the ‘method’ with the best teachers then plying that trade—it’s why we suspect that Loden is just as much Wanda at the craft services table or when laying her head down on the pillow at night as when the camera is rolling and the magic has to happen—but she also learned all D.A. Pennebaker had to teach about light and cheap 16mm equipment and guerrilla shooting methodologies. Shot primarily in the bleakest blue-grey pockets of industrial Pennsylvania on newsreel-grade film stock, is it any wonder that Wanda feels like the only film ever made in which a performer-director has deprogrammed themselves in order to become a pure and elemental alternative self and then gone and made a fly-on-the-wall documentary about that person? Of the weirdly adorable and often energetic Wanda and the ease with which she merges with or signs immediate binding contracts with choices so bad most of us probably haven’t previously considered that such choices might even present themselves to a person in the natural course of things; this hellbent and thoroughly confused friend named Wanda who I met at the movies somehow reminds me of the often divinely surgical Hélène Cixous and her mythopoetic synopsis of Cervantes and Don Quixote in Death Shall Be Dethroned: “one sleepwalks through one’s life right to the day one wakes up dead.” When in grave doubt regarding things once taken for granted it is best to shut up and listen, whether you are at church or at home doing dishes...and contemplating the hum of the furnace... 

Black Lips, "Get It on Time" (Official Music Video)