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)
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)
Enjoying a Vietnamese coffee with my old sparring partner Vinnie van Gogh and reminiscing about sex workers, sleeping in ditches, and a little dance they called the can-can. Anachronistically, I am wearing my Timberland boots even though it is twenty-three degrees celsius because they are the only articles of footwear I own just now that don't cause my feet to undergo the actual agonies and paralyzing rictus of hellfire [necrotic tissue pain from frostbite]. 🙏
If you scope the territory, you’ll quickly establish that I’m not the first commentator on record to mention expatriated American writer Patricia Highsmith in the same breath as Dostoevsky. How could I be? Above all, of course, we are thinking primarily of the Dostoevsky of Crime and Punishment, a thunderous and weirdly still novel in which the author commits a theoretical murder by having his antihero do the actual deed. Dostoevsky’s novel has two basic parts or components that might themselves be said to be mimetic of the two kinds of novels Highsmith herself tended to write. First, Crime and Punishment is about the rationalizations and snowballing antisocial animus of a criminal mind in the process of talking itself through a series of fateful transgressions, then it becomes a kind of cat-and-mouse story about this hapless guilt-wracked criminal, Raskolnikov, as he falls under the suspicion of Porfiry, the police inspector, and the two men enter thereafter into a kind of vertiginous dance of entrapment and evasion. We could to a large extent split Highsmith’s novels into two categories: firstly those that detail, often with something close to controlled glee, the aberrant stratagems of twisted minds (Deep Water, A Suspension of Mercy); and secondarily the cat-and-mouse thrillers (Strangers on a Train, A Game for the Living, Those Who Walk Away). The cat-and-mouse thrillers always feature at least one character who is seriously pathological and even the more straight-laced characters in Highsmith are at least a little kinked, often increasingly so as the pressure mounts. The Talented Mr. Ripley, Highsmith’s most popular novel and probably her best, is an exemplary case because it is the novel that best balances and co-mobilizes the two modes that usually find separate vehicles in her work. The subsequent Ripley novels also fit this composite model and Ripley Under Ground is the Highsmith novel closest in spirit and form to Crime and Punishment.
While Patricia Highsmith 1977’s masterpiece Edith’s Diary looks back to the earlier novels about kooks and cranks turned potentially dangerous, it looks immediately back also to A Dog’s Ransom and forward to Found in the Street because it upends standard genre templates with sophistication and panache, and because it focuses on specific American milieus with heightened attention to socioeconomic and sociohistorical factors, implicit here being the fact that it was a birth country to which the author hoped never to return. Edith’s Diary can be seen as a substantial historical novel covering nearly twenty years of American degeneration…if largely from the perspective of increasingly-harried Edith. Highsmith was a queer author who did not usually like to write from the perspective of women, but Edith she puzzles-out and fusses over like a mother, perhaps a useful tactical outboarding of the self. A film that Edith’s Diary reminds me of is Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Fear of Fear, a brilliant TV-movie from two years before Edith’s Diary, in which Margit Carstensen’s mental deterioration is fielded within the context of domestic imprisonment and the oppressive scrutiny of family.
In 1955, Edith, her husband Brett, their ten-year-old son Cliffie, and family cat Mildew (née Mildred) are moving from Grove Street in New York City to Brunswick Corner, Pennsylvania, “into a two-story house surrounded by a lawn with two willows in front and a couple of elms and apple trees on the back lawn.” On the surface this would appear to be evidence of a young family taking a modest stab at the American dream, ubiquitously constructed and packaged as this mythological confabulation was in the halcyon days of the 1950s with its postwar boom and its Leave it to Beaver-style social engineering. This particular family is eminently bourgeois but not wealthy. Brett and Edith are both writers, Brett a professional newspaper man. They dream of running a little paper in Pennsylvania and will go on to do so. Of course, the American dream will, while all that other stuff is going on, crash and burn and go up like so much napalm. When we meet her in ’55, at any rate, Edith is a proper milquetoast urban leftie who reads Orwell and reproaches United Fruit et al. in her diary; a “brown leather”diary that is “grainy and tooled with a gold Florentine design.”
Cliffie, markedly ineffectual son and aspiring layabout goon, too big of a fuck-up even to go to Vietnam, may likewise speak to something like maternal ambivalence, especially knowing what we now know about early childhood brain development. After what would appear to be an episode of a little light cat torture prior to Pennsylvania departure—smothering, ironically—we might even be inclined to suspect that Cliffie is something of a budding sociopath and harmer of persons. There are many early indicators that things are a little off. “A vague depression crept through her, crepuscular, paralyzing. Sometimes it was incontrollable, so much stronger than herself that she had wondered, even in the first few weeks she had been in the house, if it weren’t due to a vitamin deficiency or something physical.” Little Cliffie certainly isn’t adjusting especially well post-move, but then he has never been well-adjusted in any sort of way. Mom’s meditations on the subject of Cliffie can be outright malicious. Cliffie has little, worthless thumbs. “His ineffective hands seemed to proclaim that his grip on life or reality was nil.” While Edith and Brett are celebrating Christmas with friends, Cliffie slinks out of the house and proceeds to leap off the Delaware River bridge. He will be fished out by bystanders and returned to his perplexed and enervated parents. The next day, Christmas day, Cliffie will return to the bridge in a superhero costume and for the first time the novel shifts to his perspective. He is terribly proud of jumping off that bridge. As a dissolute man in his twenties, still living in that house in Brunswick Corner with his mother, he will continue to have occasion to recall it as his foremost act.
Left in the lurch by her cavalier, insensitive, and galavanting husband, Edith grows both cranky and eerie in that house and her pen grows more and more wicked and more and more warped. Edith will run this household however passively until the novel’s conclusion in approximately 1973, with Nixon’s resignation and the not terribly peace-with-honour-like pull-out from Vietnam in the background. Subsequent to her husband’s departure, Edith, in her diary, will invent an alternative, happy life for Cliffie, in which he is a hugely successful Princeton grad with a beautiful wife from a good family and, eventually, two adorable children, one of either sex. Our heroine is frazzled and her circuitry badly shot. Frankly, she’s now an outright kook, certain of the inevitability of authoritarianism—so why fight it?—and writing outré essays for underground publications, culminating in a satire—or, uh, is it?—on political assassination for the then-still-super-edgy Rolling Stone. “Edith did not want to give herself the consolation of a cheerful hope. Best to expect the worst. And best to pretend that all was going to be well, too. How could one do both?” A diary is a place for a voice that otherwise doesn’t have a place, a voice the is not considered to matter, perhaps like that belonging to a woman who nobody stopped to consider has a right to try and be happy equivalent to that of her in-and-out-at-his-own-convenience husband. It is the voice of a woman subject to campaigns of diminishing paternalism and false bills of goods at every level of the society…at every level of the private and public schizoid singularity.
Joan of Arc burned at the stake sixty-one years before Columbus discovered the New World.
William Shakespeare was born six years before Guy Fawkes and they were both born in April.
Confucius was born roughly one-hundred-and-twenty years before Plato.
A carpenter effectively by birth, Jesus Christ, who was almost certainly a real person, was an itinerant Jewish prophet and declaimer in a long and storied tradition, with a bit of a fire and brimstone message and a tendency to shame his audience.
A basic tenant of Roman law is that crucifixion, a hideous way to go but also very public, was to be reserved exclusively for political radicals, organized seditionists, and slaves.
The prophet Muhammad loved cats.
After a domestic dispute involving his wife in 1963, Kenyan blues singer and guitar player George Mukabi was beaten to death by a mob and hacked to pieces with machetes.
Instead of actually selling them alcohol, the fur traders working out of the Hudon’s Bay Company provided alcohol to the indigenous populations of the upper Americas in order to incentivize trade.
The day Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, an event that would kick off the First World War, which is about as baffling and absurd as facts get, seven non-professional assassins from the group Young Bosnia—armed with bombs, pistols, and cyanide—were basically wandering the streets of Sarajevo hoping they’d have a chance to kill the man. The lucky assassin, Gavrilo Princip, who was standing in front of a deli at the time, only chanced upon his surprise opportunity because Franz Ferdinand’s driver Leopold Lojka had made a wrong turn with the car.
Sarah Bernhardt, probably the most popular and successful stage actress from the period immediately before cinema, claimed she purchased a custom-built rosewood and satin-lined coffin at age fifteen in order to better understand death and play classical tragedy on the stage. Additionally, Bernhardt traveled with a wild menagerie that included a cheetah, a wolf, a monkey named Darwin, a boa constrictor, and a baby alligator.
Caustic and even often outright lewd broadway legend and icon among gay men the world wide Tallulah Bankhead once said "I have enemies I've never met—that's fame.”
Silent film legend Louise Brooks said that Charlie Chaplin sometimes put iodine on his penis under the mistaken belief that it helped prevent sexually-transmitted diseases, and that when she was a teenager dancing with the Ziegfeld Follies prior to her brief movie career he once chased her around a hotel room laughing with a large purple erection to which he had just applied iodine.
Hannah Arendt from 2001 is the first of three volumes by Julia Kristeva dedicated to exemplars of “female genius,” the second two being dedicated to Melanie Klein and Colette respectively. Melanie Klein might even make more sense as a subject and as a Kristeva cause célèbre because even though the exigencies of the where and the when of things have determined to judge Kristeva a “deconstructionist,” it's a pretty empty designation that won’t help you understand her any more than it will Jacques Derrida or Gayatri Spivak, especially since in reality what Kristeva really is is a critical theorist with a psychoanalytic bent, it’s just that she’s better at it than everybody else and more fundamentally innovative. At the heart of her work has always been a core interest in jouissance and in a basic, fundamental way she is like Hannah Arendt a woman who believes as though, perplexingly, among the first Western philosophers to have ever done so, that nothing in philosophy should be more important than finding a way to hack that thinking and living person—the biocomputer—such that their thinking and living make them happy. Arendt insists that life in the lifeworld should be liveable and lived, and not a matter of shadows and appearances. Before becoming a kind of all time de facto commentator on twentieth century totalitarianism, Arendt was a woman who came to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, her professor, by way of Karl Jaspers and St. Augustine. The female genius part begins with a preoccupation with natality that supersedes Heidegger's preoccupation with death. There is an interest in individual lives as indelible, singular narratives. Of all the core principles and exegetic loopholes that define and encapsulate Arendt’s genius, the maneuverable piece that is most feminine and most philosophically important is the way she replaces the primacy of death and considerations of the impenetrable mystery of death in Heidegger with a rejuvenating reorientation toward natality and childrearing. Ardent respects more than most major thinkers, perhaps more than any since Leibniz, the basic intelligence of any creature. Arendt, in the end, is interested in lives lived by thinking and acting beings in the company of one another and in a politics that might supplant general monoform estrangement and our much faster and louder version of 19th century alienation. In wanting to interrogate and challenge her own presuppositions as part of a daily list of basic duties, Kristeva takes the baton from Arendt and heads off running at light good enough to see right by, such that everything and everybody will look their best…and to their own advantage. “Can the beautiful be sad?” asks Kristeva rhetorically in Black Sun, her 1987 study on melancholy, before continuing: “Is beauty inseparable from the ephemeral and hence from mourning? Or else is the beautiful object the one that tirelessly returns following destructions and wars in order to bear witness that there is survival after death, that immortality is possible?”
