False Sanctimony

 

Laura Warholic [Reprise]

Hate, hate, hate. Like a happy little steam engine. Beast of burden and the return of the repressed of every last grievance. Nasty invective, everywhere, going every direction, basically just the weather around here, pre-internet and all. The 20th century. Where Fidel Castro and Marilyn Monroe kiss, maybe. And what of the wider world? Worlds? Swamp gas? Yes, we’re burrowing inward, we be sundering, but the encyclopedia has to have its widths accounted for also. Horror and horror-comedy keep our unsteady nerves jagged enough to be very quick, responsive...reactive. Mostly. And the impetus to connect, to identify and establish meaningful intimacy, positively a commandment, if apparently forgotten by nearly all and performed perforce as pantomime. My man Mr. A. Theroux: “The problem of AIDS intrigued Eyestones as well, and specifically the cause of it, the worst disaster that we can reasonably expect to befall humanity in our lifetime.” And yet the AIDS crisis ultimately has nothing on the conditional opacity of grounded situational specificity, the locked-in syndrome of consciousness and identity, the failure of a self to either reckon with itself or supersede the hinderances it once imagined protective armour and which at a certain point may have a tendency to become the invisibly writhing self entire, its fake armature actual exoskeleton. A failure to provide or establish gravity, a failure to recognize the self where it is not flattering to look. We avoid hard work by asking for tasks. Western (wo)man(+) pleads for busy work and talks shit 'til lights out, bitter about the work and taxation of hours. Where do we place Theroux's Euegene Eyestones, sexual intellectual with blue balls, and what do we do with him? And do we not recognize this as precisely the problem with which Euegene himself wrestles? Where do I put myself? Beside that lady? Christ, really?! Laura is at all times a hot mess, a hopped-up vengeance freak, not easy to be around and she sniggeringly knows it, ever more unpleasant and circular of argument, habitually. Swiss. Clock. Work. “Mania or depression. Dopey energy or disinvigorating dead-endedness.” That’s Laura, muddy as a brash oil painting. “Why did he put up with all this shock-and-awe? Was it because he was convinced that by way of his understanding he had a way to help her? She was weak, he understood that, and yet a weak or soft metal that is alloyed with another weak element, amazingly enough, may produce a strong alloy with strikingly different properties from those of the parent metals. Copper and aluminum are both fairly weak, but the addition of 5X aluminum produces an alloy twice as strong as copper! Buckets, bridges, buttons, boathooks, biscuit tins, bugles, and bells—throw in as well, he thought, the brides and grooms of fate!” Sounds lovely. What could possibly go wrong? “Laura flourished in the malls, Eugene soon saw, who realized that if you have seen one, you’ve seen the Mall.” [Rimshot.] On a cross-country road trip our pair encounter wonders the likes of “a rattlesnake cattle round-up in Okeene, Oklahoma” and “discussed what foods they hated and chose their top ten favorite travel spots and did Zen exercises such as what does Zen taste like and what color is Zen and what is my original face?” It’s the worst vacation ever, but very close to real intimacy, and ultimately sadder than shit. Eugene confesses, possibly only to himself, that Laura’s “blank, uncomprehending stare irritated him so much he wanted to shove her off a butte,” but, ever with the big picture cross-referenced perspective available for consultation, Our Dubious Father of Sexual Intellection (eck eck) remains able to remind himself that everybody has their reasons, forgive them Pappy for they know not what they do, and “Hadn’t a drugged sleep been forced upon her?” Poor Eugene. Will he ever find his Our Lady of the Fully Formed Thought? “His disapproval became a mirror of what she soon saw she needed to hide and to avoid. On that trip but even before, he clearly saw she had become the dark source of his columns. She was a dark Rorschach blot he was determined to puzzle out.” Those final two words, “puzzle out,” are the index of a fatal weakness. Gustave Flaubert’s (encyclopedic, hilarious) Bouvard and Pécuchet. “The tiny contribute by totality to tear down.” Alexander Theroux tells us this directly just as the personnel at Boston's Quink weekly do with full peacock's verbal array and persistent soul-murdering resentment. But what of the expansive intellectual, the great and open lover, the philo-sopher who ‘cares so’ and evidently does so for the sake of the caring alone? In short, dramatic irony makes of him a monkey, then something more ghastly, and then it pulls out the rug, or maybe pulls back the curtain, leaving us with a profoundly sobering glimpse of actual no gravity and all that was once a person with all the human stuff now “smeared, stained, the way our tears actually mourn for us.” “Eyestones was a dreamer as dreamers go and as dreamers go, he left.” In Alcoholics Anonymous they tell you to identify instead of comparing. It’s good advise, leading one quite possibly from the trap of abyssal indentitarian tribalism, but it comes with a codicil, ‘kay? The thing about the imagination is that operationally you need to decentralize command and avoid getting the tires stuck in the muck. Eyestones: “When in The Sky’s the Limit pilot Fred Astaire flies off to war, one of the most unforgettable moments in all movies is that final heart-stopping closeup of Joan Leslie whispering…what? A prayer? A vow? A declaration of love?” A lovely string of rhetorical questions, vintage A. Theroux, but I think what is most lovely is the quality of openness here that will allow things to be left hanging. This too is a way, and it may have occasion to sparkle quite attractively. Check this out, for example, from Laura Warholic; or, the Sexual Intellectual, a novel whose title I really like saying out loud, page 469, chapter called “Katabasis”: “Did she dream about stags? Did she dream about deer? Did she dream about the wind and the rain in her hair? Did she speak about angels? What did they say? Did music somewhere in her heart start to play? Who was it held her? Gave her her part? Kissed her to fill up the hole in her heart? Why is a fountain? When is a tree? Who walks on the mountain? How breathes the deep sea? Are forests forever? Can honesty bend? How far is never? Why is the end? Wasn’t it time to give voice to her soul? When did she whisper? Where did she cry? Will the feeling of kneeling before love ever die?”

The feeling of kneeling before love will never die. However, in the very near future, paradise, like in Godard's Notre musique (2004) or Romero's Land of the Dead (2005)...or Don DeLillo's escape hatch plan Mao II (an extremely fine novel from 1991, though even DeLillo pales beside A. Theroux)...or even in the drop-out cinemas of my contemporaries Harmony Korine and Giuseppe Andrews (who is half a year older than me), infectious, scabby, and dicey as I find these....paradise...paradise will not be what was once not a parking lot, though Joni is assuredly welcome whenever...paradise will rather be a casually situated semi-remote compound you can protect and ornament without all that much effort...

Also, please. 

We as a people. 

Can we talk about Laura Warholic and her death? And the deaths of a whole lot of difficult friends we never speak of anymore...of the people we saw not comprehend that a brother or husband was gone forever out of seemingly nowhere...of the tragic dimension we require and seldom face unless forced?

L-U-V

JPW

The Sky's the Limit (Edward H. Griffith, 1943)

Giuseppe Makes a Movie (Adam Rifkin, 2014)

The Cinematographic Confessions of Maxine

I am Maxine, I am but a young woman of nineteen.

In my brief time on this earth, I have come to find that men very quickly regress to a bitter, infantilized state because the greater society has not incentivized their proper growth and development, not that I'm so ignorant as to imagine it all a one-way-street sex and gender-wise; my adult sister, for example, continues to steal scissors from the hairdresser's. Why? Ask her. You can expect petulance and remorseless harangues. Sometimes I feel like gentrification is driving me out of the known universe. Are there other colonies at the workshopping stage? Nobody can keep a restaurant open. The restaurant people are all drunkards and rattled by dope. My neighbourhood is a ghost town. Dawn told me she saw an actual tumbleweed on Tuesday.

Last night the guru and I fucked and then watched Once Upon a Time in...Hollywood by Quentin Tarantino. There's a bunch of truly excellent stuff in the picture but it's also true that Sharon Tate isn't really any kind of actual person in it and that the whole basic arc of the story has Rick Dalton, played as a temperamental but congenial dummy by grande dame Leonardo DiCaprio, complaining in the introductory act that his career is destroyed on account of his having to go make Italian pictures which are to his mind substandard and unpopular...plus, you know, Italian...only for him to return to Hollywood in the final act to not especially help save Sharon Tate in the company of an Italian wife who looks like a flat-out add for an Italian wife. I told the guru that this is why I hate western civilization. It were as though the interchange of articles of commerce absorbed people along with objects and the people were all flipping through one another like items in a catalogue, all with great haste and impatience, making loud derogatory remarks the whole while. The guru understood. Hold still, he said, and tell me where you feel it in your body. I said my left hip was quivering and my tailbone tickling.

The hips, thighs, backbone, and perineum constitute, says the guru, the power centre of primordial intelligence. There is a canister in there and if you let it blow off steam in moderation you can slowly remove the somatic skullcap without in any way penetrating bone. In your guts lies the power to really and truly and maybe once and for all BLOW YOUR MIND. That's actually basically all Hatha yoga is and it's also at the same time the dragon filmmaker and international bohemian Donald Cammell chased until he found himself staring at his dying face in a mirror held by his wife. Or that's maybe, uh, apocryphal. The guru and I just watched White of the Eye (1987). Holy fuck.   

Just watched Drive-Away Dolls (2024) with Susan. Ha ha. So good. A hoot and a holler, as they say, plotted like one of those Donald Westlake novels Aunt Mertle loves so much. I had just seen Margaret Qualley effectively launch her career by way of the languorous demonstration of her exposed feet in Tarantino's supposedly second-last film, so now it is delightful to see her glamming it up all daffy white trash and bringing over line readings that would make Nicolas Cage blush. Susan, who is 95% queer, says they were originally going to call the film Drive-Away Dykes but then weren't allowed. People are pussies and losers. The film was co-written by a lesbian and you can tell. Mos def. Margeret Qualley's mother is the actress Andie MacDowell who my parents really loved in Four Weddings and a Funeral and who I always related to on account of both her and I obviously being basically insecure perfectionist types. Andie's fastidiousness and anal-retentiveness are worlds away from her daughter's lithe unworried goofiness, although I did see a Robert Altman movie called Short Cuts once where Andie MacDowell does a whole bunch of crying and I do remember thinking that she sure does cry kind of goofy.

What a weekend! Yikes. Okay, so I saw this movie called Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021) by the amazing Japanese film director Ryusuke Hamaguchi and let's just say right now I'm just in that place where I'm feeling super grateful that I found the cinema and the cinema found me. I have an idea. Of course, I immediately had to go hash it out with the guru. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is three discreet short films in a way, and the characters in each section are relegated to that individual section alone. The film is above all else about a concept that believe it or not comes from science: communication always and necessarily communicates miscommunication along with its communications (one of the basic traffic hazards of space-time). People can misperceive and misunderstand all too naturally, to be sure, but we can also see instances where people use the tools of communication, bodily and verbal, to actively deceive, to one degree or another, with whatever degree of malice. It gets worse. Every individual person in this situation, which I needn't remind us is basically everybody's damn situation, has tastes and opinions and all kinds of beliefs that overlap and don't or cause disharmony or don't...or which simply make it impossible very often for one person to meaningfully understand in any real way what another person is trying to say. So this was the idea I proposed to the guru: what if you wrote a kind of review of the movie Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, except it's the characters from the different sections reviewing the behaviour and choices of the characters from the other sections in a really catty and judgemental way? Think about it! What could better inform the hyperconnected and totally dislocated 21st century human quagmire? I figure you might as well have a bit of a laugh on the slow slide into the slop. The guru himself laughed as, stretching like a satisfied lion, he said: should figure they could get a computer program to untangle that ball of yarn for us... I know I'd love to hear what I've got against me...

        

Two, Devout

 

Brooksie

And so I have remained, in relentless pursuit of truth and excellence, an unforgiving executioner of the bogus, an abomination to all but those few people who have overcome their aversion to truth in order to free whatever is good in them.

- Louise Brooks

His and Hers

- Tear it all down, girl.

- Well, if it isn't the Leprechaun Dog his rangy self. How about some English dubbing for the attention impaired, buster? I'd caution you to pause and reflect before proceeding. And don't fidget.

- Not gonna lie to you, baby, we are absolutely going to engender a large-scale catastrophe, but it will also be the birth of something new. Or else we blew it. Like in Easy Rider. Or Point Blank. A couple years earlier. A guy says that in Point Blank too. "We blew it."

- Who will think of the people of Yawooza? Bring that smelly shit over here, mister. Slip me the sizzler, my ass hoisted in game accord. 

- It's about time we brought in Ol' Stumpy Whisplash from up Fort St. John way.

- Both the right kind of attention and the wrong kind of attention are hellbent attention; indifference is dispassionate. Please don't do me any derogatory speech.

- Lean over the counter and let me have a view of the moon.

- A real man wants to lay with his compliment or other half rather than 'some piece' or a series of interchangeable wenches. Now give me some space, I have to get ready. It's a big gig tonight—we're on the bill with Pussy Drano and DJ Jizzy Jeep.

- I am writing a book for Cambridge University Press on the tragic story of babies with hideous congenital illnesses.

- Now get this! A pussy that sucks your dick! As-salamu alaykum.

- I'm starting to think I'm punching outside my class with a mighty fine piece of ass. I desire dearly to sniff your crotch.

- Some people tell me I look like Jean Peters.

- Bless you, you are indeed a curvy lass with a curvy ass.

- Fudge. Born and gone to hell. Let's all have a glorious summer!

- You have the legs of Faye Dunaway.

- Mister, you better know that if I turn you on you're gonna start doing what you were made to do, got me? Ha. I knew it! What do you think I'm looking at right now? Confusion, humiliation, and impotent rage. And it sure ain't pretty.

- You don't understand. Wherein lies the problem? I don't get together with people who have boyfriends and husbands. Those are the kinds of ghosts you need to worry about haunting you.

- No certainties in life. But bad prognostics. We need to be as a raging fire upon this earth. Through the dinky dimly.

-This is not a problem I have previously had often. But I have had this problem.

- Sometimes destiny will hold you still and make you wait. A principle and a law. Relevant especially to times of war and revolution. Slip me the meat and I'll be back on my feet.

- Mack Truck McGlintock don't take no shit. A hearse with a nurse in reverse. Everyday working people like you and me.

- Golly, Joan the Maiden sure has let herself go!

- I am afraid that this is not the sort of reception to which I'm accustomed. I prayed, you know, very earnestly, so I expected things to go more smoothly here. Did you know that prayer is interactive electrical network activity? I am not going to go and adopt values that are not my own purely for your convenience and self-satisfaction. And if you do not give me what I want I am going into caveman mode.

- You're being refreshingly frank.

- People say I'm unfuckable. I'm profoundly disgusted that they imagine I might want to fuck them.

- Lunch today is electro-shock pastry cock. What's it gonna be, dump truck?

- I'll slip you the ol' Stinky Rodriguez.

- The switchboards are jammed.

- Hey there Ichabod Crane, would you like to see my pussy-licking game? I wouldn't bother trying to ask for help if I was which I ain't. Take the pressure off of waiting by mastur-a-bating.

- I don't know yet. I just ate a whole mess of pork and beans.

- I'm gambling with my life, but who isn't? In God's promise of abundance hereafter there is implicit a guarantee of beaucoup pussy.

- You my one and only diggy doggy slap pappy.

- May I bend your ear in a manner most sincere?

- It's so hot I can't think. I need my teeth fixed and my butt squished. If you were my eternal love you would do everything with a good deal more panache indeed.

- The foreskin is a magic memory machine-toy of occult nature.

- I want to beat Susan's ass. You probably don't know her. I've basically had it with this heat. I'm getting out of here. In this heat you'd be as limp as a soggy french fry. A'ight, Valley of the Ultrastuds?

- It's not that I can't make the first move. It's that we make a couple moves and then I don't know where we are anymore.

- I'm moving to Santa Fe.

- Well, don't employ the death drive unless you really, really have to.

- Be nice, mister. Nicer.

- Put me in a dysfunctional situation and watch everything go to pieces.

- My therapist says I have to work on my caretaking.

- Caretake this dick. 

- You're cute. But, once again, no.

   

 

Sylvia / Suspect

Sylvia

...

Suspect

I had myself original in my origins. Swallowing codswallop on all sides and then some, the proliferation of new amusements anything but amusing. My return to my hometown had not meant to preempt all possible futures. Disarranged furniture was the condition of conditions, cross branded into chest, of the beloved who fell into ill temper at the dissipated reverie and very real shoddy workmanship and unchecked hubris that produced me amidst the sawdust and street noise. I am the cloying man you met on the staircase. It was I they were investigating and you they were investigating too. It was outside of our purview. Do you remember my corset? How about my Yankee belt buckle? It was for me true that the problem for Noah as for Moses was hubris, this being the case also for innumerable public personalities as for me and for you. There is no soft touch in the ceiling of nature. No, my hand on your forearm right this moment is no soft touch neither. I folded the cabaret and pocketed the debts, sleek in my peacoat going ninety in a thirty zone on my sore-ass feet. You will milk this almond, madame? Who shall disabuse me of my shawl? As a child I was the notorious ‘Skateboard Killer.’ My prerogative was cheap thrills. I never go no empathy ‘cause I never got nothin’, which don’t mean you can pin no mangy beef on me, see? I remember the first head I cracked with my board and the kid’s house right behind him as I did it. I did not set out to find a mess but I never went anywhere I didn’t find a mess. On the island of Maui I got COVID and hallucinated a bad scene in which there were two women wrestling and a man officiating; one woman was unconscious and the other I guess thought she was faking and being a drama queen so she produced this futuristic egg beater-like device from out of thin air and started drilling into the thigh of the other woman who was no longer feigning unconsciousness or not feigning unconsciousness but rather screeching in agony and writhing like a fish on the deck. For us who remain suspects, trawling our corrupted worlds, is it not a matter of feigning unconsciousness, having always known that wasn’t going to cut it. Our heads are not concealed and they can be lopped off by any game cock. Nothing touches me except the pressure of what separates us in the vivid living disconnect. I don’t want to burry myself in your peevish esteem. I don’t want to glory in the thief’s festival or abnegate my responsibilities with my church group. Punch me in the muncher if you must, but I do not stand for lineups. You’ll have to beat me comatose and hang me there, an approach doubtless to brook commentary at the very least from attorneys and such. It is not for me to say what is to say. It is not for me to say it anyway. It is not for me to say...a thing...a thing. It is for me to stay and remain. It is for me to climb the stairs and collapse into the pool of black syrup to which I’ve been reduced. My clothes just there abandoned to the side a little touched with that flash of strewn stain. On the stairs I heard the lady with the poodle and her friend from the veterinary clinic. In the sky I heard the sirens and I heard a hatred too big for us to contemplate yet a hatred which had found us and which wants us and which wants us syrup. Baby, listen. We don’t know one another very well. The look on your face isn’t very encouraging. I can’t blame you but I’m not going to feel you all up over it either. Before they get here I need you to return your gaze to me and tell me that you see me and know me all so I will have known that I was known. I know it matters very much, but I never figured out where or to whom.

xoxo

The Allegory of the Adolescent Spider

I had been dating

or trying to date
two-and-a-half or three women
at the same time
when I arrived at the monastery.

Filled in on my lifestyle
the myriad headaches engendered
the abbot told me the allegory
for the first but not last time
of the stupid punk-ass spider

half-toppled by visions

of self-mastery

easeful primacy

over-eager and over-confident
this spider

who gets stuck
in the web he has just spun
there to slowly perish
cursing himself exasperated
with uncontainable vehemence

though diminishingly...

surely

gradually

diminishingly...

23 Drawing from the Summer of 2024

 If, therefore, such a ‘demonic’ complicity, insofar as it is always experienced by the artist as external to his will, provokes in him the obsessively persistent vision of something, it is that it arouses in the artist a state wherein the aspect under which the obsession appears reappears on the painting and awakens in the contemplator a state responding to this aspect… Reproducing the stratagem, it is for the artist to exorcise the obsession.

- Pierre Klossowski,  “Retour à Hermès Trismégiste – de la collaboration des démons dans l’œuvre d’art”

...

When I started to draw again with some focus during my most recent psychiatric admission, I quickly came to an appreciation of the fact that the distinct pleasure of making some kind of quick and kinetic drawing is qualitatively different from that achieved in writing or making music, contexts where for myself the parameters have to be fundamentally clear for anything to even happen and where I have spent time cultivating skills I know how to use such that they now may be employed in an intelligent and targeted way. As somebody applying lines and strokes to a page I have no idea what I am after until, like Pierre Klossowski, I start to see imaginative mobilizations of my carnal desires, secret rhyming tendencies and archetypal scenarios with crucial autobiographical content, and horrible things with specific phobic imaginative anatomy that it is a challenge to face—this stuff immediately flagged as the raw content I will be likely to chase after most ardently, carved then with any luck into a tremulous permanence all the better to be inspected at leisure. The answer to the question of why I draw now and continue to and plan to continue is easy. I am very pleased and very surprised by the drawing that is emerging before me, as long as there is a drawing in front of me to be stirred to both heinous and rapturous ends (with a high tendency toward the mixing of the colours). Is something from my future or past stalking me? Death is a lottery so intricate they had to invent a whole new number system...in the distant future...we're still unravelling it...the pen is scratching like a seismometer. I've been psychotic and I've been ecstatic. I know daemons as travelers of circuitry the kind of which shoots through all of us, moving pens and digits and associative connections even in the most liberating extremities of autokinetic autopilot, space-time blasting back at you like an inverted cone...which is easy enough a thing to draw, come to think of it. Am I running from anything? Did I inadvertently leave behind some sin so heinous I locked it in a box and buried it under concrete and decided to go on and act the grinning fool like all were prim? No. There is very low chance of aggravated psychotic paranoia for me anywhere on the tangerine summer horizon. All I see are bunnies...fucking...like bunnies...and savagely chewing each others' throats out, fur matted with blood (and the whole while the drapes on fire). Thank goodness. This is sweet, sordid God-sized stuff the early pagan Roman could and did get behind, this putting they in good company with the Vodouisants of beleaguered Haiti and creole adherents of ancient rites everywhere. All those people are my friends, no contract need be signed nor whispered clasp-handed ritual undertaken. Just look at my drawings. You'll see the main things that make me uneasy: sudden but also regular chaos doing whatever the fuck, meanness and cruelty, humiliation and shame, perverse aggregations of mongrel forms (especially as relate to human commercial life and dating/marrying/fucking), the human mouth, violent creativity, and the millions and millions of tiny rhinoceros horns Félix Guattari said only a truly mad individual would see where in fact there were but mere goosebumps on his skin.     

...

They Live (for John Carpenter)

Révélation Masque [société pour l'abolition des rôles]

The Wheel of Time

El Santo Versus the Influencer from New Jersey

No, Don't Even Bother to Get Up...

Newsie

Bart Simpson Done Had It
 

The Assassination of Julius Caesar with Caesar on His Cell Phone 

Paraguay 

Manfred Stays Home

An Elf Runs Amok

 

Sunflower for Vincent van Gogh

Armed Locals

Portrait of David Cronenberg 

Conga Line [sexe bouillabaisse chez Gérard Depardieu] 

Bloodymurther

God of Love [castor fou]

Fear and Hostility

Sex Reassignment 

Portrait of Friedrich Nietzsche 

Invocation of My Demon Brother

Thoroughly Modern Millie

Don't You Howdy Me, Mister 

Prolegomena to Any Future Terrestrial Habitability