Threepenny Oppenheimer Pt. 7

John Huston
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Albert DeSalvo

Not only does Claire Denis’ 2013 neo-noir masterpiece Les salauds calculatedly borrow from Sanctuary, William Faulkner’s most provocative and controversial novel, the instrument and venue for a horrific act of sexual violation that neither work depicts directly, but Denis could like Faulkner also in general be said to utilize crime fiction elements for elevated purposes whilst masterfully unfurling a sophisticated narrative characterized by ellipses and effervescent ripples of uncanny causation. All readers of detective novels know that criminal investigation gets all its cables crossed and tangled as matter of perfunctory routine. Anybody with a cursory knowledge of Hollywood and its lore will be aware of gregarious, larger-than-life director John Huston, son of the legendary actor Walter Huston. A born showman. John Huston also had a deeply sinister side. A problem drinker and womanizer, to be sure, but I’m afraid it would appear to extend beyond even that. He was friends with Los Angeles doctor and Venereal Disease Czar George Hodel, a man who would go on to marry Huston’s first wife Dorothy and later be credibly implicated by his own ex-homicide-detective son Steve Hodel in the extremely famous murder of Elizabeth Short—the Black Dahlia—as well as a flabbergasting array of other homicides. George Hodel’s daughter Tamar would not only accuse her father of engaging in an incestuous sexual relationship with her, accusations backed up by first-hand witnesses, but would also accuse John Huston of heinous improprieties. Consider in this light the fact that Roman Polanski, of all people, would cast Huston as an utterly prurient plutocrat who has an abusive incestuous relationship with his own daughter in 1974’s Chinatown. Additionally, Susan Tyrrell, who had a bad drinking problem herself and was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her performance in Huston’s 1972 masterpiece Fat City, would later accuse the director of assaulting her in a car during pre-production for that film. When something notably bad happens in a densely populated area worthless accusations come poring into the call centres. In her book The Boston Stranglers about the so-called Boston Strangler and the railroading of Albert DeSalvo, who was never formerly charged or tried, author Susan Kelly very quickly gets into the business of serving up a basically perfect true crime saga for the quantum age because it is impersonal and multi-perspectival, certainly, but also because Kelly has no choice but to remain largely agnostic with respect to the material over which she’s combing, every last detail stress-tested from six angles by one form of freshly emerging insanity or another. We have eleven or thirteen murders in the first half of the ‘60s in Boston, a very large city teeming with dynamic human enterprise, and we never figure out if it was one or two or three people who committed these strangling murders…or if it was closer to eleven or thirteen. Every time we look at an individual victim new sinister dimensions appear to reveal themselves. We know that Albert DeSalvo, seduced and flattered by his attorneys and the Strangler Task Force, confessed to all of those early-‘60s stranglings, though he couldn't have committed many, if any. What do you even do with guys like DeSalvo and Henry Lee Lucas who just won’t stop confessing? They’re almost like gambling addicts.

Histoire de Marie et Julien (Jacques Rivette, 2003)

In "The Last Wolf, ” one of many, many pieces by the beloved Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai the germinal seeds of which can be traced back to the influence of Austrian curmudgeon Thomas Bernhard, consists of not just a single paragraph but, indeed, a single seventy-six page sentence which superimposes time frames and ingeniously situates the entirety of the digression within the context of its retelling, like a lengthy digression from a 19th century English novel. In Krasznahorkai there is an implacable sense that man is a monster, and a grave danger to himself. Susan Sontag called him approvingly a master of the apocalypse. The hunter dutifully clocks his own extinction. There is a taped interview I love very much in which the filmmaker Jaques Rivette, having been asked by his interviewer about the “fantômes” in his film Histoire de Marie et Julien, grows extremely animated, insisting no, no, no, they are not fantômes, they are revenants. Different mythologies; different “space-times.” One of the key things that separates the revenant from the fantôme, insists Rivette, is the former's corporeality, indeed its carnality, explaining as this does the lovemaking in Histoire de Marie et Julien. Krasznahorkai’s 2016 novel Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming is about three revenants, the second of which is the eponymous Baron: “when still in his forties the doctors had told him that this would happen, that he would become an idiot …” The Baron desires nothing more, apparently, than to return to the Hungarian town of his youth so as to reconnect with his first love, Marika (or Marietta). An emblematic revenant, the Baron Wenckheim is spectral, unnerving, in some sense hardly there at all. He cannot stand to be touched, he presents as aphasic, maybe borderline demented. Finally arriving at her domicile, the Baron does not recognize Marika as herself though he does note a passing resemblance. She’s pretty cheesed about it: “was it possible something had really happened with the Baron’s mind?! because it just wasn’t possible for him to come here, to sit down in front of her, look at her, and not remember who she was, that simply wasn’t possible …” It proves to be a cataclysmic encounter, cosmic outer-atmosphere payload by the kiloton. Marika is shattered. More calamity is on its way, all of it pooling together, sure as the frost on the pumpkin. The Baron, escaping a diabolic meddler, walks into the forest and effectively out of the novel. The third revenant arrives subsequently, in the form of a poison pen letter, signed by the Baron but certainly not written by nor in any way sanctioned by him. Poison. Pen. The letter constitutes a blistering, categorical judgment, and it will lead to the immanentization of the eschaton and scorched earth every which way but loose. “The whole thing will go up in flames.” Krasznahorkai’s cosmology figures the universe and the human being within a constitutive condition of extreme agitation. We're standing upright on two legs like grubby teetering imbeciles…and we can get unpleasantly emotional. The Professor, internationally prominent specialist on moss, will have cause to ruminate, even entering intimate philosophical colloquy with a dog, though he has previously been known to kick dogs. He will bemoan that “the world is nothing more than an event-lunacy,” and, meditating on eternity, will himself briefly become analogical equivalent to the bird standing pensively in the Kamo river at the beginning of 2008’s Seiobo There Below; “the proper method of liquidating thought,” avers the prof, “is the standing position, that is our basic stance, in motionless observation, because only from here, only from this stance, do we have a chance, perhaps …”

The very short third paragraph of Gustav Flaubert’s 1881 novel Bouvard and Pécuchet—his best and his funniest—bearing all the curt gravity of fresh cataclysm announced: “Two men appeared.” Take note, Samuel Beckett. “One was coming from the Bastille, the other from the Jardin des Plantes. The taller one, wearing a linen suit, walked with his hat pushed back, vest unbuttoned and tie in his hand. The shorter one, whose body disappeared inside a brown frock coat, lowered his head beneath a cap with a pointed visor.” A special Parisian windfall having unexpectedly fallen, Bouvard and Pécuchet, granted to do wither they wilt, genuine in their zeal, committed in their puttering fashion, countr'fied, and forced into tenuous alliance with a farmer and his wife, set about fussing tirelessly at the immediate surroundings, setting their hungry eyes on mastering agronomy, which they will bungle imaginatively, repeatedly, and exhaustively, aghast and vexed at their inability to bring anything off in a manner that corresponds to expectations. “The wind enjoyed flattening the beanstalks.” It is not long before Bouvard is making scandalous use of cadavers for purposes of fertilization. Sheep are dying in considerable number after being forced to undergo his amateur phlebotomies. A focus on agronomy will tend to splinter off absentmindedly into peripheral disciplines, this a mode that will be repeated with numerous fantastically dynamic variations over ten more or less full chapters. “The worm that grows in the sheep’s brain and causes its death has an anatomy just as complex as the sheep itself,” argues Bouvard the Philosopher, sanguine at least for the moment. The distinctive physiognomies are the generative ground for the differentiation of these two imaginary men, closer than close. Thin, anxious, adult virgin Pécuchet becomes the physical and moral expression of suppressed trauma or a related complex, the implication being that the prude of the pair may have good reason to be gun shy. Controversy and acrimony can only inflame ardent bonhomie. “They tried to find solid bases for reasoning. The bases collapsed—and suddenly there was no more idea, the way a fly skitters off the moment you try to catch it.” Getting right with information means getting right with time, which is the embodied time—pulsed and non-pulsed—that you have on the earth. The spending of time becomes the spinal column of an individual style, the one-off aberration and wonky singularity that each of us constitutes itself constituting that little bit of vibrating difference, love, compulsion, and/or desire roping us into one another and into things. “Their words flowed tirelessly, remarks following upon anecdotes, philosophical musings upon personal observations. They denigrated the Public Works department, the Tobacco Authority, business, the theatre, our navy, and the entire human race, like men who had suffered grave disappointments. Each one, listening to the other, rediscovered forgotten parts of himself. And although they had passed the age of naïve emotions, they both felt a new pleasure, a kind of blossoming, the charm of affections newly born.”

Burning Star Core, Operator Dead...Post Abandoned [Full Album] 

F.E.A.R.

F.E.A.R.

- false evidence appearing real -

Spotlight on a Murder (Georges Franju, 1961)

La rupture (Claude Chabrol, 1970)

The human being that exists halfway through the year 2026, the vagaries of progress being whatever they may be, does not have developed faculties or specialized equipment adequate to cognate the incoming future with anything other than projections and fancy, whatever thin and dancing extrasensory vein does or does not herein obtain. Think about it. All your technical equipment is just you and you’re all you have. You take in the signals and you let them resound or flop to the floor like a flounder. The future you’re envisioning is tinted heavily by the extremes to which you’ve gone to avoid learning anything and by the dreams you’re having mostly unconsciously about the furthest and must gruelling extremities of pain in a blinding spatiotemporal window of horrific openness, outside even to the outside of itself. Hell is not other people. Hell is precise and rigorous torture without hope of surcease. Who came up with that shit? The Japanese? Beats me. Seems like it could basically have been any one of us. I mean, read history much?

Master of Suspense Alfred Hitchcock believed in addition to the fact that cruelty can kind of be funny, that its own culpability is what makes the audience squirm when seated attentive and taking in a lavish Technicolor murder spectacle made with professionalism and panache. It has been argued that even to pay an electrical bill is to be a flunky of the $tate. I remember once hearing about a series of assaults in my neighbourhood and being convinced somebody would blame me. Of course, they may well have. How would I know? How is my paranoia on a scale of one to ten? Who’s asking?

I used to romanticize the counterculture of the ‘60s and ‘70s. But we all know what happened to the Baby Boomers. (They shit the bed ridonkulous.) It’s impossibly fucking grim. The drop-out dreamers who brought us the Whole Earth Catalogue, jam band agrarian communes, and garage rock venture capitalism…and who breathed the breath of life into the fledgling internet…ultimately invented the key tool of gluttonous neoliberal expansion, our intrepid psychonauts of yesteryear getting high on the hogs of greed and wrath akin. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari—the populous pair—asserted that capitalism “makes the earth increasingly uninhabitable the more thoroughly it encompasses it.” Yup. Open pit mining and strip mining especially. 

You are looking deep into a well and things are starting to appear there because you are looking so hard. Do you hear someone down there? It isn’t novel or radical to insist that dreams are yelling at you in order to get your attention about something, hastily underscored directions for a supine soul horrifically off course. It’s because the self is an escape room and so is the cosmos. I brought Freud for his huffy accord.  Blech, he says. Which is good as gold or gravy. The hollow earth is a projection of the spinning heliocentric human who is imagining like an absolute Mad Hatter corncob that gravity is a business of apples dropping down. 

Fear goes after, peeps, breaks, enters, collects trophies. Fear is running a program across the urban delirium spectrum. When your lights start to go out they come to collect. Who’s that you say? The Angel of Death and his blue-smocked crew. How in the fuck do you happen to do?  I was reading that Uranus was hit at some point by some very large astral object that knocked it badly off its orbit such that now, whereas the rest of the planets spin like tops, Uranus rolls forward like a wheel. The precipitating incident happened billions of years ago. Nobody’s coming to accuse you of running off with the Moscow State Circus, Uranus in your arms.

The Reverend Patrick Brontë and his wife Maria had six children together, residing in relative isolation at West Riding, Yorkshire, in the north of England. Damp as hell, I would imagine. Among the six kids were three sisters who would come to be universally considered among the most important writers of the 19th century, the last of whom, Anne, was born in 1820. Maria Brontë died the following year, age thirty-eight, probably of uterine cancer, though she may also have had tuberculosis. The eldest Brontë daughters, Maria and Elizabeth, are said to have contracted tuberculosis on account of the harsh conditions at the school to which they were sent away and died in close temporal proximity to one another. Emily Brontë and Patrick, the sole brother, would both die of tuberculosis in 1848, as would Anne the following year. Charlotte Brontë would live the longest life of any of the siblings, dying in March of 1855 at thirty-eight, the same age at which her mother had passed. The Reverend Brontë lived to be a man eighty-four years of age, dying in 1861, pre-deceased by his wife and all six of his children. So much death, so regular the visitations, a distinguished clan laid progressively to waste. Sayonara, Gangsters. No wonder they used to call tuberculosis consumption. 

Fred Frith, Gravity [Full Album]

My Favourite New Record of the Year Thus Far

 

Threepenny Oppenheimer Pt. 6

 

Women working as computers for the U.S. Space Program

Tao Yuanming and Su Shi

It was James Bridle in his book New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future who first hipped me to the fact that computers were once people and that was the name of their job. Often these computers would sit at desks lined up in rows in large rooms crunching numbers in the hopes of accurately predicting the weather for this or that military during wartime. Almost all our major technological breakthroughs begin in research with military applications. Computers will not set you free. More numbers on the abacus means more smoke in your eye, not crystallinity and transcendence, bub. It’s Antonioni’s Blow-Up: the more you zoom in the more it’s just opacity and blur. The 21st century Russians especially are a case in point. Viewers of Adam Curtis’s documentary HyperNormalisation will be familiar: the Russians are less interested in cherry-picking Western leaders or pushing measures like Brexit through than they are in producing mass confusion and animus upon which they can capitalize, and it is in this light that Trump can be seen as a kind of rampaging asset. Our perplexity and incapacity will only grow. Our economics and technology are inherently divisive and they are running hella hot in maximum overdrive. At the end of his chapter on "Conspiracy," James Bridle speaks of living in the "gray zone,” a temporary autonomous zone that "allows us to sample from the myriad of explanations that our limited cognition stretches like a mask over the vibrating half-truths of the world. It is a better approximation of reality than any rigid binary encoding can ever hope to be—an acknowledgment that all our apprehensions are approximations, and all the more powerful for being so. The gray zone allows us to make peace with the otherwise-irreconcilable, conflicting worldviews that prevent us from taking meaningful action in the present." It is not a matter of finding our way out of darkness but rather of finding a way to live within it…until the solitary pinprick star in the distance fades out anticlimactic once and for bless’d all. Why be interested in class struggle without desire, madmen, and adventure? Do you simply wish to hand over the key to your locks and chains to some new patron? In The Chinese Pleasure Book, her encompassing study of early classical Chinese thought, Michael Nylan apprehends a vital and vibrant living territory that is stridently pragmatic, rejecting immutable moral law, making use of the “delicate constructions” in classical Chinese rhetoric, and committed to sustainable pleasures for as much of the community as possible, modifying “models and commitments as necessary.” What I would call the ontological dimension of pleasure relates to cosmic order, resonance theory, and ‘qi.’ All things have 'qi,' which is spirit or vital energy. Resonance relates to embodied immersion in the macrocosmic domain—manifold frequency connectedness. Translating ‘le’ as “pleasure,” Nylan tells us, will rub certain people the wrong way. She explains why she doesn’t think happiness or joy work. She looks at all kinds of different synonyms for different forms of delight. Rapture, enjoyment, et cetera. I could not help but consider the concept of ‘jouissance’ as elaborated by various thinkers steeped in psychoanalytic theory, especially Julia Kristeva. What distinguishes ‘le’ from ‘jouissance,’ to my mind, is the former’s sober pragmatics and dependence on the natural and the prosaic. A central principle is that the sage lives with an ever-present consciousness of living vitality. From the Zhuangzi: “Great understanding is broad and unhurried, in contrast to petty understanding, which is cramped and busy.” Then we have Yang Xiong, the Western Han philosophical master famous in his time for his ‘fu’ poetry. Yang would seem the apotheosis of early manuscript culture, writing in Exemplary Figures that books “are as alluring as women.” Yang Xiong’s rhetorical question: “Are you for the Way or for profit?” The seventh and final chapter of The Chinese Pleasure Book—probably my personal favourite—addresses the poets Tao Yuanming and Su Shi, separated by almost seven centuries. I was absolutely blown away by the fragments of Tao Yuanming’s poetry included in the Zone edition of the book; his work is at once profound and plainspoken, sometimes ironic, and almost modern as such. “Tao never expected unalloyed happiness at all times; by his lights, he, like all other mortals, took pleasure and felt sorrow by turns, even as he sought to realize the full magnitude of life’s simple gifts.” Su Shi dedicated much of his life—seven centuries later!—to cementing a kind of spiritual bond with Tao, writing matching equivalents of almost all his predecessor’s poems. Both poets dealt with exile, travail, and expendable downtime, attempting the whole while to maintain fidelity to the Way, with varying degrees of success. Tao Yuanming was explicitly an inheritor of Confucian wisdom, Su Shi in dialogue with emerging Buddhist ideas and practices. The final section terminates with a large number of Tao’s poems juxtaposed with Su’s corresponding variations. If Tao excites me considerably more than does Su, largely on account of his commitment to earnestly communicating his own struggles and doubts, the parcel entire is enlightening nevertheless, and I would not given editorial licence have excluded any part. As Warren Oates says in Two-Lane Blacktop: “Those satisfactions are permanent." 

Most people who know me now know about my friend Paul in the low desert of Southern, California, who was my closest friend as an adult even though he was born in 1940 and, when he took sixteen years sober, boasted: “sweet sixteen, never been kissed!” And then said: “sixteen years sober and not one day of personal growth!” He was hilarious. I actually had another friend named Paul back in my university days and he was a real character too. He was a year or two younger than me and his wide black spectacle frames and jet-black hair actually made him look more than a little like the best friend Paul on classic sitcom The Wonder Years, played by Josh Saviano (or like Van Dyke Parks on the cover of the album Song Cycle). I took note of Paul when I happened to catch him presenting a paper to other students and a professor in the film department at Carleton, University on his childhood obsession with Blue Velvet and the way it could not have helped but determine his personal development. His rhythm and language were good, the often self-deprecating humour was genuinely clever and endearing, and he was obviously trying much harder than even my serious academic friends to produce solid and defined pieces of quality writing. It was Paul who changed my life by showing me Andy Kaufman and Freddie Blassie in My Breakfast with Blassie. He loved outsider and degenerate comedy and was also a connoisseur of tape-cassette-era pornography. Together, Paul and I wrote an anarchist remake of the ‘80s teen comedy Revenge of the Nerds where we took every single scene from that film and tried to see how we could make it more subversive and confrontational and yet still fun and inclusive. All Fears of the Forest was the title we gave to our gnarly and unkempt remake of Revenge of the Nerds; we took it from the song “Changes” by Phil Ochs. I still have all or most of the screenplay sitting in a box. Paul and I also made a short film that people did see but which I definitely think would be best conclusively vaporized from the surface of the planet, in which Paul filmed me semi-covertly as I walked around three different Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets with a disturbing grin on my face, acting aphasic and out-of-it, saying nothing more to anyone other than the word “chicken” repeatedly and with increasing hopelessness. I know for a fact that we were largely inspired by Lars von Trier’s The Idiots but I think the influence of Tom Green, too. After all, Mr. Green came up with and perfected his schtick in Ottawa, on our stomping grounds. I even knew a guy who said Tom Green had sex with his girlfriend at a house party back in the Organized Rhyme days. I have a nude scene in this little video movie. Actually, we decided to make it the opening scene. I enter the foyer of a house in the suburbs dressed like a business man in a peacoat, then I hang my coat carefully on a hook, strip off the rest of my clothes, which I leave piled on the floor in the foyer, and finally enter the house off-frame, stark naked. It did not take me long to become embarrassed by this whole thing. Even worse was the Andy Kaufman-inspired open mic performance art we did—and filmed!—with me playing the nastiest barroom piano in history, him telling vaudeville era jokes, and the general volume and misrule rapidly growing unwholesome. When I saw that tape a few days later I asked Paul to please destroy it. One night some of my friends aggressively rustled me to alertness when I was passed out drunk and then recorded me on video as I thrashed about, whined, and pitifully threatened them, my friends lightly chuckling as though I were the entertainment following the courtly feast. I will confess that I did not at all like this footage either, but even then could see perfectly well that I’d brought it on my own no-account goldarn self.       

Anne Carson performs A Brief History of Sky Writing, 2010

Live performance of Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, 2019

During COVID lockdown, the Facebook page for the Louisiana Channel brought Canadian poet and classics scholar Anne Carson’s wonderful Lecture on the History of Sky Writing into my life—out, as it were, of the blue. You can find the performance I watched over at Vimeo where it remains to delight and engage uncommonly canny surfers of the web and happeners upon alike. Lecture on the History of Sky Writing was originally performed at the New York Live Ideas Festival in spring 2016 and shortly thereafter at the Whitney Museum. The piece finds Carson standing before podium and microphone delivering the lecture in question, a comprehensive history of everything and more composed by the sky itself, collaborator Robert Currie, got up in nifty western garb, participating in the role of Beckett’s arrival-averse Godot, fanciful banter serving as stimulating counterpoint. Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, released by New Directions in early 2020 in an ultra-slim volume, is a delightful patchwork of poems and fragments of prose which compounded altogether serve as a playlet, in a similar vein to the sky lecture, like which it was originally presented live, as the page following the obligatory copyright boilerplate informs us, at the Shed in New York City, premiering on April 9, 2019 (less than a year before the New Directions edition). Norma Jeane Baker who is also Marilyn Monroe is also Helen of Troy. That’s the high concept elevator pitch. Norma Jeane has rather materialized in Troy to occupy the Helenic seat, which leads rapidly to further obfuscation and shroud-shifting. Who actually went to Troy? Norma Jeane Baker? Not exactly. “A cloud in the shape of Norma Jeane Baker.” A cloud that flummoxed the armies. A cloud indicating not only epistemological opacity, obliquity, and obfuscation of the identity of all things and creatures, but also flux and blinding light. Norma Jeane Baker of Troy is married to a man named Arthur. We do not get Arthur’s surname, but we would have cause to imagine it to be Miller, and he’s “king of Sparta and New York.” He has gone and led an army to Troy in order to drag his wife home and hopefully earn back her affections. “As Marilyn used to say, ‘Keep the balloon and dare not to worry.’” Systems are being undermined, the order of things not only called into question but tripping on banana peels in a public thoroughfare. Helen of Troy and Marilyn Monroe traditionally occupy distinctive and very separate timelines, but you fold those timelines over one another en papillote and you get a whole bunch of the more things change the more they stay the same, much of this revolving around the subjection of women and the sacrifice of female idols taken by force. We are told the Greeks prize women below gold “but slightly ahead of oxen, sheep or goats —”; the men of Greece and Los Angeles and New York are driven to distraction by “that WMD in the forked form of woman.” Having once considered dying her pubes blonde to match her iconic simulated Marilyn locks, Norma decided that men prefer the bush the way it is. Is that how they want it? What do men want? “Most men like what slips away. A bit of strange. But I digress.” This is a cloud talking, and she’s expert at slipping away. Slipping away back to the hotel; slipping away from Fritz Lang and MGM; slipping away into any given set of arms. The ground of our groundlessness is entropy itself. What our experts in thermodynamics call entropy is mainly a tendency over time toward the loss of net organization within all systems. The 20th century was rich in entropy literature, especially once things got post-atomic. Much of this literature involved the loss of net organization of history or historicity, a posteriori, sequence and record collapsing into themselves like a tower pancaking. In certain respects, Norma Jeane Baker of Troy has quite a lot in common with a novel like Donald Barthelme’s posthumous The King, in which a manic-maniacal mash-up has the Dark Ages insinuating themselves back into the Second World War, Ezra Pound as nutbar radio personality intermediary. Anne Carson is much more an actual anarchist than the self-destructive and sedentary Barthelme, and though sometimes she may speak on behalf of the sky, sometimes she speaks on behalf of…dirt. “Dirt is something that has crossed a boundary it ought not to have crossed. Dirt confuses categories and mixes up form.” Dirt is “coming to get you.” Rape is one of the book’s themes and one of war’s. Carson returns a couple times to Persephone, a woman made famous in large part on account of her having been raped. May we not perhaps begin to grow convinced that Persephone will have her revenge? She might not even have to lift a finger. Maybe all Persephone needs is a certain number of her ducks in a row and advantageous atmospheric conditions.

Ikue Mori, Labyrinth [Full Album]

Top Five Classical Hollywood Romantic Comedies [in Chronological Order]

More happy love! more happy, happy love!

- John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn"  

Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks, 1939)

The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941)

The Strawberry Blonde (Raoul Walsh, 1941)

Cluny Brown (Ernst Lubitsch, 1946)

The Apartment (Billy Wilder, 1960) 

John Coltrane, A Love Supreme: Live in Seattle [Full Album]

💀

☣️☣️

Threepenny Oppenheimer Pt. 5

In my second year as an undergraduate student at Carleton University in Ottawa, as an elective I picked the big quasi-obligatory Canadian literature English class with dispassion and a certain amount of indifference. Great gifts arrive best that way. I’d already been surprised by how much I liked Hugh MacLennan’s dusty and handwringing Two Solitudes when they had us read it back in high school, but this course very quickly became a delight I looked forward to weekly and three of the books on that syllabus are never far from my mind to this present day: Susanna Moodie’s Roughing it in the Bush (hot off the presses in 1852); Ernest Buckler’s The Mountain and the Valley (1952); and, from Alberta my home and broken hand, Robert Kroetsch’s The Studhorse Man (1969). At the behest of an editor, when immigrating to Upper Canada near modern-day Peterborough, Ontario during the 1830s, Susanna Moodie wrote a "guide" to settler life for British subjects considering coming to Canada, such that not only did she have to suffer setbacks, hardships, weather, and topography, she also had to get it all down and hand in her copy on time. What is toughest about this brazen and formidable woman is her composure. From right here on the Canadian prairie, Robert Kroetsch’s The Studhorse Man is more than any other novel I know like the penis of a horse. You heard me. When I read it back in ’98-’99, I remember how much it reminded me at some points of Thomas Pynchon and at others of Rudy Wurlitzer, both American writers of the burnout counterculture who I fussed over back then...in my ringlets. Hazard Lepage, the self-proclaimed last of the studhorse men, attempts to preserve the bloodline of his rare blue stallion, Poseidon, against the backdrop of Alberta in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Poseidon is ultimately conscripted into nonstop impregnation for the industrial production of estrogen for birth control pills. I think it’s meant to parallel the atrocities of Nazi Germany. One passage involves seventeen different slang terms for the male sex organ. A sex act may or may not bring one character back from the dead. A prairie home companion for all. It’s the book in the middle of the CanLit three, however—Buckler’s The Mountain and the Valley—that was most relatable to me, touched me the most deeply, and even left me in a bit of a cold sweat a couple nights…almost as though it were destiny talking. Definitely inspired by Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and for certain written pretty tipsy, The Mountain and the Valley is an autobiographical Bildungsroman set in Nova Scotia’s beautiful and lonely Annapolis Valley. Growing up in the direction of his author, dissipation and ruin in the fallout of molten creativity and haywire yearning, from the epilogue on we know that protagonist David Canaan, his name practically a set of spiritual chains around his ankles, will die on the summit of the South Mountain at the age of thirty. The thing that touched me the most back in ’98-’99 was the way in which creativity is demonstrated to bloom. Young David cannot go serve in the Second World War, so he starts to write fictional stories about himself serving over in the theatre of operations on the Europe continent…and then naturally realizes that you can really travel all kinds of places using this simple and affordable technique. Our professor told us that he and some other devout supplicants at the teat of letters once went on a modest pilgrimage to see Ernest Buckler at his farm in Nova Scotia and that though the great man opened the door to them agreeably enough, he was so insensibly drunk that they did not ultimately stay long.

Gilbert Sorrentino

Budd Lake, New Jersey

It is never going to be easy to discuss no-bullshit Brooklynite Gilbert Sorrentino’s wonderful 1980 novel Aberration of Starlight without dutifully invoking Rashomon, both the 1950 Akira Kurosawa film and the 1922 Ryūnosuke Akutagawa short story upon which it is based, perhaps the most famous parallax narrative of them all. Folks probably have some cursory knowledge of Rashomon and its basic engineering at the very least. The story focuses on a single event, backing up multiple times to come at it from the disparate vantages of the various tangentially-connected characters who participate in it from the standpoints of their own individual position within its schematics, informed as these are by contrasting conditions and outlooks. The word “parallax” refers to differences in how an object will be perceived conditional to the location of the observer. In the Sorrentino the event around which all pivots involves an act of violence between adults that is witnessed by a boy. This concern with variations in perception and another additional concern with the fundamentally illusory character of things as they are perceived, is already foregrounded in the title Aberration of Starlight and the epigraph at the beginning of the novel explaining it: light traveling from a star appears to be “traveling along a path at an angle to the true direction of the star” because of “the component of the observer’s velocity in a direction perpendicular to the direction of the star.” Sorrentino is less concerned with perceptions and misperceptions of the central event as event, and more with how the event registers in each of the four central characters’ narrative construction of his or her own self-modifying on-the-ground reality. Aberration, like much of Sorrentino’s early work, expresses a distinct and potent species of soul-sickness. This is a novel that becomes increasingly grim. There is a spreading sense of psychospritual desolation and devouring moral rot. It is telling that its mounting nastiness coincides with the two final sections focusing on the inner lives of its two adult males, two spectacularly malign individuals, first Tom Thebus, a recently divorced womanizer, and second John McGrath, father of Marie, also recently separated from her spouse—a man targeted with a great many epithets reserved for those of Italian heritage—and the woman Tom is cravenly pursuing. If Marie and her ten-year-old son seem sad and brittle with nothing good coming their way, in Tom and Mr. McGrath the sadness mutates into two modes of pathetic, callow monstrosity, a woundedness that wounds back with malice, the tongue forked. Tom is heedless libido, a born user and despoiler. McGrath is another case altogether. He’s not a predator nor much of a lech, at least not at the level of his actions and observable behaviours, but he represents reactivity and ressentiment, those eminently unattractive characteristics Nietzsche saw rise in the shadow of classical Jewish theosophistry and the Church of Blame, and which Sorrentino regularly bestows unflatteringly and as a central defect on men in his darker, more brooding fictions. His emotionally brutal and a-challenge-to-take autobiographical 1966 debut The Sky Changes might well remain the foremost exemplar here, actually. McGrath’s ressentiment is in large part born of emasculation; an emasculation exacerbated by decades of marriage to his domineering and spiteful wife Bridget, who has recently died. John is one of many characters in the novel who spouts racist vitriol or generalized disdain for those of different ethnicity/race, a behaviour the novel routinely ties to impotence and self-hatred. McGrath is enamoured of a recently widowed German woman at the boardinghouse who herself expresses sympathy for Hitler, and we cannot help remain mindful of the fact that the Second World War lies on the immediate horizon in terms of the novel’s historical timeline. As to the “one outstanding flaw in the otherwise carefully composed whole” respective of Tom Thebus in his cocksman’s pomp and poncy protocols: the fact that the man’s “trousers hung from his waist to his thighs with no readily distinguishable evidence that he possessed buttocks.” What? Didn’t nobody tell you a man need a ass to push with, boy?

Ferat Vampire (Juraj Herz, 1982)

Diverting things a little, perhaps, with respect to threepenny standards and procedures, I thought I might extemporize on two car accidents from my past…and I’ve had a few of ‘em. In a way, one of my major achievements as a teenager was rolling my puke green Volvo GT into a farmer’s field without writing the car off. Truly. We continued to drive that redoubtable Swedish cocksucker. I lived in the country and my school was in the country, such that much of my commute in the last year-and-a-half of high school was along gravel roads. I had my sister with me and we were going down the fairly steep hill on one of said gravel roads when I got a puncture in one of the back tires. As soon as I hit the brake the car started to fishtail and swerve. I went off the road at the bottom of the hill, took out a stretch of fence, and rolled the Volvo once. We got out and stood well back until somebody came. We were both back at school in a few hours, good and shook but damn well gonna barge our way through the rest of the bullshit day. A friend who liked the Pynchon novel upon which it was based told me he got in a fender bender right outside the theatre after seeing Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice because the movie, which he basically liked, left him dazzled and thrown. Something similar happened to me in my final year of undergraduate studies. I had spent the afternoon at the townhouse in Kanata I was sharing with two other guys reading Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy for Bela Egyed’s Deleuze seminar course, which was really lighting up my nervous system like a pachinko parlour. Active and reactive forces; the eternal return of the same [under the sun of difference]; affirmation. I got in the car to go to Deleuze class and, heading from Kanata to Ottawa proper, hit the back-end of a series of small pileups on the 417. I know that my judgement was unnaturally impaired by Nietzsche and Philosophy because I saw what was happening in enough time to avoid hitting the car in front of me, but just couldn’t make it happen, the deer caught in its own headlights. However, the upshot is that I was the first car in that particular pileup not to get hit from behind. Somebody let me use a phone, and I called Egyed at Carleton and told him I’d probably miss the seminar on account of a pretty weird car accident I’d just been in. He said: Oh, my God, of course, I hope you are okay, be well and take care of yourself, how awful. Anyway, about twenty-five minutes later I walked into the class…

Royal Trux, "Chairman Blow"

* Chairman Blow is a tough dude who do what he choose