On Prayer

I have loosened, deflated, and relaxed my prayers under the influence of fresh and fairly convincing intelligence of God’s recent departure to parts unknown, and now to even notify whoever is left at the abandoned Heaven colony of my presence and sound health, I am forced to make unnaturally loud noises on my knees beside my humble cot before sighing hard and laying myself down upon it, all aches and jitters, never sleeping any more than twenty minutes at a time and listening for long stretches to my prayers echo back through the ducts. My grandmother’s girlfriend in Windsor said not ever to pray for patience because “God’s gonna wallop your ass on account of he knows more than you by a bushelful respective of how much shit you can make a person try ’n' learn to be patient about.” My grandmother’s girlfriend is a lady named Madge and the arrangement is odd, for sure, but the way my grandmother describes it, she was an old lady when grandfather died and she simply could not be choosey. In Alcoholics Anonymous they claim they pray “for knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out,” and that both makes good sound sense and means that you should not pray for treats or reprieve or fancy that your every impulse or compulsion is God giving his co-signer’s blasé thumbs up. A reprieve? The reformist drunks in the church basements and community centres, many holding on by the skin of their teeth, believe that all they have is a daily reprieve contingent upon the maintenance of one’s spiritual condition. What is a spiritual condition? It is the state of being sentient and surrounded by all kinds of stuff and noise that doesn’t make any more sense to you than you do. Madge has one of those old hulking ashtrays that you can roll around and lives in a storybook neighbourhood that made me chuckle it was so quaint and sleepy. She’s a recovering alcoholic and private prayer connoisseur, into all the styles, methods, and arcana. She looked at me hard and told me that looking at things really hard is actually a specific style of meditation. “You are anemic,” she added. “Hush, boy. God has been informed now and there’s nothing to do but sit here and talk turkey, waitin’ on that miracle.” I asked her if there was anything to eat and she casually threw upon the table three Tootsie Rolls that she had been concealing I do not know where.   

Walter Matthau

Walter Matthau was born in New York, New York in October of 1920, seven years before Sergei Eisenstein's film October, and he dies in my arms every night...under the barn owl's oversight. Both a charming character actor and hardscrabble wiseacre lead sort of like the great, avuncular Richard Jenkins has become for contemporary audiences, Matthau's ultra-specific persona was definitely nowhere else better served in our cinema than it was by crotchety Don Siegel in his incandescent 1973 caper-comedy masterpiece Charley Varrick. Even if Dirty Harry looks pretty idiotic on a first assessment, that Don Siegel was no dummy and Dirty Harry became in the end as much of a meme as any popular movie ever made...aside from perhaps Deep Throat. I love Walt because he is tough, cuddly, and acerbic. Richard Jenkins can only play himself but also does basically everything, a head-down workhorse to Matthau's snarly lion of yawning slack. That's just me having my read, friend. Have yourself your own look-see. Jeepers, heavens to Betsy, what have you got to lose?!

Neil Young and Crazy Horse, "Trans Am"

Updated Cover Letter

 

It’s not that I’m indifferent to whether or not there’s still actively existing souls aside from the quantities more or less known tuning into the show and keeping updated on the fussed-over programming, absolute eternal backflip flapjack that it is and always aspired to be, but nothing changes the fact for me that, however you cut the deck or say your piece, I have to find stuff to do all day every damn day and from now on I am no longer the unflushed turd for middle management to pretend to ignore, Cuban heels clapping on the hardwood floor, because I have a right to my own oversight and the selection of tasks with proper allure and sense of worldly purpose. I make my own destiny, you tricked-out bingo dauber in shirt and shoes! I have had a hell of a time having any time at all and I’m no longer going in for room temperature folderol, fool me three times shame on the eavesdroppers and the switchboard operator too. Do me a favour and riddle me not. The coarseness in me will call you out publicly, exemplar that you are of the obscene recreational breeding that leads to mindless girls who never stop smirkily preening, imagining a sphere of influence no more substantial than something you might wrap distractedly around your index finger whilst gabbing supercilious into the spume of telecommunications. The French have to celebrate their ghastly revolution with all them miscellaneous Bastille Day blues and all that ornery folkloric street action because they were definitely saddled with that history and no other, but try getting them to address the matter of all the hideous public revolutionary mutilation, savage desecrations of the living and the dead, special relish and devotion saved for the disfigurement or removal of all or part of the genitalia. No revolution has ever been about the triumph of the just and/or the restoration of balance. All revolutions are about the comprehensive failure of the state apparatus and the crowd fanatically avenged, at its own pace. As I have gotten older, I have grown much more afraid of the crowd than I am of the state apparatus, not that I ever exactly greeted that seedy blockbusting kaiju monstrosity with open arms either. The picture of the American outsider in American western movies aided by grit, savoir faire, and moral intransigence in the face of graft, exploitation, conspiracies of silence, power politics, and fear, always appealed to me I think because I like and recognize the topography and am painted salmon pink to imagine myself concocting nifty means to trespass against it with halo and lariat, seeing myself in the earthy and mud-spattered mirror of Clint Eastwood’s high plains drifter, hearing myself in Will Hutchins’ rightfully famous line from Monte Hellman’s The Shooting: “I don't give a curly hair, yellow bear, double dog damn if ya did!” The loner itinerant outlaw walks a corkscrew path so good he’s practically Fred Astaire in top coat and tap shoes, picking the pockets of entire city blocks, swooping and leapfrogging. How you are to approach and enter the saloon given the current temper of things and recent upsets among the cattle barons, cutting close and coming around the side in the hopes of catching two or three of them blind. It is less that I do not wish to connect and form meaningful bonds with other people at this late date than it is a matter of the hand of destiny having set a table where I’m to be seated alone and gun shy and endlessly indulged by Charles Dickens Christmas ghosts. Join me and the Industrial Workers of the World in dumping the bosses off your backs. They don’t care about you any more than if they were maître d’hôtel in some swanky uptown joint, fake nice and real meanness. If you give it the proper amplitude, honey, it’s still fucking servitude. Never give a sucker an even break…and get me a grave plot next to W.C. Fields if it’s not too much of a bother. If I want to spend the rest of my life perfecting the art of writing long, winding sentences of both aesthetic and structural perfection in the manner of Henry James, laying it on thick as molasses and then finger-painting with the stuff, then by God that’s what I’m a-gonna do, riding side-saddle with my koala bear muse. The only limit on my ability to tell the cold sober truth out loud and at length is the capacity of my interlocutor to stand there and take it without folding like a deck chair. Scoot if I’m losing my patience with you. That’s my advise. It means I have something to say.   

Portrait of the Artist as Moo Goo Gai Pan

Satoko Fujii, "Inori"

Twenty-Five Unsung Cinematic Masterpieces About Young People [in Chronological Order]

Sweet Five Alive tidings, Hooo's Hooo at the Zooo, to play your wax paper kazoo to, chewin' on that kudzu... 

I worked for newspapers. I worked for newspapers at a time when I was not competent to do so. I reported inaccurately. I failed to get all the facts. I misspelled names. I garbled figures. I wasted copy paper. I pretended I knew things I did not know. I pretended to understand things beyond my understanding. I oversimplified. I was superior to things I was inferior to. I misinterpreted things that took place before me. I over- and underinterpreted what took place before me. I suppressed news the management wanted suppressed. I invented news the management wanted invented. I faked stories. I failed to discover the truth. I colored the truth with fancy. I had no respect for the truth. I failed to heed the adage, you shall know truth and the truth shall set you free.

- Donald Barthelme, "Brain Damage"  

The pool hall was important, especially on Sundays at noon, after church. I got kicked out of high school seventeen times.

- Nicholas Ray, I Was Interrupted  

Crazed Fruit (Kō Nakahira, 1956)

Black Peter (Miloš Forman, 1964)

La chinoise (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)

Warrendale (Allan King, 1967) 🇨🇦

Mes petites amoureuses (Jean Eustache, 1974)

The Traveler (Abbas Kiarostami, 1974)

The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (Nicolas Gessner, 1976) 🇨🇦

North Sea is Dead Sea (Hark Bohm, 1976)

Une vraie jeune fille (Catherine Breillat, 1976)

Passe ton bac d’abord... (Maurice Pialat, 1978) 

Over the Edge (Jonathan Kaplan, 1979)

Navajeros (Eloy de la Iglesia, 1980)

Made in Britain (Alan Clarke, 1983)

O.C. and Stiggs (Robert Altman, 1985)

Smooth Talk (Joyce Chopra, 1985)

De bruit et de fureur (Jean-Claude Brisseau, 1988)

Pump Up the Volume (Allan Moyle, 1990)

The White Balloon (Jafar Panahi, 1995)

Kitchen Party (Gary Burns, 1997) 🇨🇦

Nowhere (Gregg Araki, 1997)

Freeway II: Confessions of a Trick Baby (Matthew Bright, 1999)

Nobody Knows (Hirokazu Koreeda, 2004)

Detention (Joseph Kahn, 2011)

Jeanne (Bruno Dumont, 2019)

Medusa (Anita Rocha da Silveira, 2021)

Ramones, "Teenage Lobotomy" 

Hip Hop, Rap, and Gangster Rap: Shaking Your Ass in the Line of Fire

 

Dr. Dre

In the 1990s as a young person you couldn’t step into the arena of culture without hearing an awful lot of hip hop, rap, and gangster rap, which was mostly fine with me. Popular music interests me just in principle. When I listen to a shitty piece of manufactured pop music or force myself to shit through some hideous Hollywood atrocity, I am always gladdened that I’m compelled to take away at the very least insights of a sociological nature. The Japanese film director Takashi Miike once said that no movie is bad enough to make sitting in a movie theatre unpleasant. My relationship with gangster rap took an unusual turn when we moved out to the country southwest of town when I was thirteen and I quickly befriended a sixteen-year-old boy named Doug from down the way who had a driver’s licence and whose mother had a charming little llama farm. There was also the matter of his uncle’s ample video cassette porn collection. I was partial to the Seymore Butts series. Doug was not ultimately to graduate high school and his prospects cannot be considered to have been good, but he and his two best friends who were brothers were good running mates for a precocious kid marooned on the edge of civilization. These were the first boys with whom I was to ever get properly gooned on spirits. Doug only played gangster rap in his car and always said that since he was driving the passenger had to listen to whatever he the driver wanted to play, even his mother being subject to this arrangement, which struck me as crazy even though I made my mom listen to Megadeath and Slayer when I was a kid, sure she’d at least appreciate the virtuosity. Rap and gangster rap of the 90s vintage weren’t exactly my thing. I wanted Mudhoney’s guitar sound and to break shit on stage, but back from the beginning of things some rap had appealed to me in a real elemental sort of way, rife with fun performative advocacy and hilarious grandstanding, and it was especially Run-DMC and Public Enemy that I revered above all, notwithstanding the tug of alliances pulling me from metal and toward punk and dirty guitar rock, hip hop and rap figuring only parenthetically…theoretically. Doug was obsessed with N.W.A and all its various solo offshoots, et cetera. He loved playing the Ice Cube solo albums more than anything, all of which I found turgid and drab, but I liked Eazy-E’s more wildly performative stuff and really, really love Dr. Dre’s post-L.A.-riots community-building project The Chronic, which I suppose you could say even allowed Doug and I to properly bond a little and which does the exact thing party music is supposed to—ergo, it makes you shake your ass—while at the same time more or less introducing the world to Snoop Dogg of Long Beach, California, who writes pretty stupid rhymes but who nonetheless has the most mellifluous West Coast flow ever caught on magnetic analogue tape. If you give too many gifts to an iconoclast then, sucker, that’s your ass. Those anointed celestial walk a narrow margin through the yarrow and the margarine. Just like Snoop Dogg of Long Beach, California, elbow-deep in a suntanned jar of Orange County honey, we are what we are and is what we is and the reason we don’t trade it in for better is ‘cause we’re afraid of what worse shit we’ll get. Fuck all y’all. Peace. 

American Gangster (Ridley Scott, 2007)

Dr. Dre, "Let Me Ride" [Official Video]

Jazz and Improv Duos: Discount Tuesday Playlist

 

Edmonton, 2018

Steve Lacy and Mal Waldron, "Evidence"

Anarcho-syndicalist 

COVID Outreach Worker

Exquisite Corpse

He wanted to see the girl again. Maybe for the last time, he thought. But he had thought that before, and no time before had been the last time.

- Patricia Highsmith, The Cry of the Owl

If your mind has vanished so much as to render you unaware of its loss, you had better stop clutching at what has already been taken away from you.

- Paul West, A Stroke of Genius: Illness and Self-Discovery 

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Vienna, 2021

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Alice Coltrane, Journey in Satchidananda [Full Album]