My New Chantal Akerman Fridge Magnet

Another Triumph for Humanitarianism!

Merzbow, Pulse Demon [Full Album]

My Two Favourite Merzbow Records Are Both from 1996!

Top Ten Robert Coover Novels

 

Robert Coover is my favourite American writer of all time by a considerable margin. Here are my ten faves from among his twenty-one novels. The dear gus died in October of 2024 and I'm bummed I never got to confabulate with this most esteemed of elders in person. Heh heh, you can tell they're 'postmodern' just by looking at the titles. 😄 

Walk and Talk With Me

If it's all so fucking futile, what the fuck are you so fucking upset about, fuckhead?
- Eric Bogosian, SubUrbia 

The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010)

Steve Jobs (Danny Boyle, 2015)

Molly's Game (Aaron Sorkin, 2017)

Hasil Adkins, "Walk and Talk With Me"

Three Superlative Beatles Covers [in Chronological Order]

 

The Supremes, "Can't Buy Me Love"

Ike & Tina Turner, "Get Back"

Bill Frisell, "Strawberry Fields Forever"

A Selfie and a Song and Then a Shelfie

 

Full grown, get down

I need a full grown woman

- Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, "Full Grown"

There is more. A lesbian travel agent in Saint Tropez has been questioned about her alleged intimacy with Madame Pompidou.

- Edward Chisholm, Murder in Paris '68: A True Story of Death and Glamour

Jon Spencer Blues Explosion & Dub Narcotic Sound System
"Fudgy the Whale"

* Both Charles de Gaulle and Dylan Thomas died on my birthday!

A Sermon from Erlton

 

Today I have gathered you together, the anointed and the garlanded, in the hopes that God may not trespass against us, hoping to divine all those precious artifacts that we might carry with us like the ancient pharaohs to whatever awaits us on that others shore…the one pronounced and promised in the bluegrass music of old Kentucky. I am the sermonizer and I carry along with me nothing remotely resembling wrath. I am an imperfect man searching not for perfection but rather hoping against all odds to become better at being imperfect right here and right now because that’s all we got. In his sermon on the mount, God advises us through his embodied son to be more like the bird of the air and the lily of the field. The hereditarily doomed German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is saying the same thing when he advises us in near-desperation to prioritize ethology over ethics. When you don’t understand something just ask. What ethology means for Nietzsche is very close to what Deleuze and Guattari mean when they talk about becoming-animal, which is to say that ethology means natural creatural behaviour without subordination to higher human values but with survival and coexistence still in mind. “Freud described three great historical wounds to the primary narcissism of the self-centered human subject, who tries to hold panic at bay by the fantasy of human exceptionalism,” admonishes Donna Haraway. The three wounds are the Copernican wound, the Darwinian wound, and ultimately the Freudian one. The Jewish and Viennese Dr. Freud was not above a certain amount of equivocal self-laceration. In the 21st century, to look at what we’ve done to the earth and persist in believing in our exceptionalism is both monomaniacal and a crime.

The quickest way to reach God is to look within. You are made of the same subatomic building blocks as everything else. God and the devil are the same thing; sensorial life is polarized. To take care of yourself and look after your body is to fend off angels and demons. You don’t want angels and demons crawling flickeringly through your windows, believe you me. Tibetan Tulpa and Haitian Loa and the Great What-Have-You. Romantic Angelicate, Closed Circuit, Secret Gnosis of the Central Nervous System's Basic Operational Polarity. What is time? You’re too terrified to even really ask. Time is three cherries on all the slot machines at once and they suddenly blow their top, like in Twin Peaks: The Return. The owls are not what they seem. Little birds chirp in order to mock us; owls arrive with the full force of God-sanctioned death. Your are no more than an enabling formal vessel like a puppet and you do not yet have any idea what kind of damage can be done to you remotely. Memory orbits around itself and it is impossible not to get dizzy; you can only stand on two feet for so long. I plead with you not to let your relationship with God grow toxic. You do not want to become one of the malefactors of eternity. “You pushed forward even while pieces of you were falling away ravaged and bleeding,” writes Paul West, “and you did not bother signing your name to your life…” Indeed it is the person’s name, the proper noun itself, which prevents that person from apprehending the greater world.

The other shore is the contravening non-side of all theoretical sides that might be taken or adopted. A distorted consonance of sides and a constitutive differential of alliance. The side of Eve is the side of life. Death’s side is the pigpen, mortuary of mud and shit. The slow and stupefied suicide of the human race turns power into a verb and the earth into a rendering plant. There is a real divine mandate that is hopelessly obscure to us. Any triumph of livingness over death would have to strip this world of the sociopathic reign of the human individual. It is impossible for us now to imagine a utopia that isn’t despoiled from without or within. Let us pray. All clarity is a true clarity we would rather not possess. You are not made to meet it without suffering, your joints and sockets and their errant carpentry. All of the current models are horribly compromised, new models are needed. My humble advise is to sit in a pasture and read indefinitely.

Eric Dolphy, "Eclipse"

Elmore Leonard

 

Out of Sight (Steven Soderbergh, 1998)

Any bibliophile or bookworm out there is surely aware of the propensity of writers toward drink (occupational hazard). William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker. Parker once said that she didn’t keep notebooks because whenever she did keep one she’d invariably leave it behind in some bar or restaurant. It is also I hope commonly known that certain writers didn’t hit high gear until they got sober and more or less stayed that way. Popular favourites in this category include Raymond Carver and Barry Hannah. When Carver was teaching at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop alongside pioneering dipsomaniac realist John Cheever, the two of them were known to make a hellacious scene wherever they went together, and when he ultimately got sober Carver said that his whole life thereafter became gravy. His writing for sure improved and book sales appear to confirm that. Elmore Leonard might be the greatest of the publicly recovering alcoholic novelists if only because he remains the most widely read and the most fun. His trajectory is pretty charming: first he wrote westerns drunk and then he wrote crime novels primarily set in the city of Detroit whilst stone cold sober. If Leonard is a bit like the Charles Dickens of Detroit he is even more like Honoré de Balzac because he has a whole universe unto itself where characters reappear novel to novel and the urban situation overlaps itself for purposes of creative merriment. Notably, Michael Keaton plays the same character in both Jackie Brown—Quentin Tarantino’s brilliant 1997 adaptation of Rum Punch—and Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight from the following year, clearly yet another sly move on the part of the ever-canny Soderbergh. In Leonard’s novel Switch, the characters Ordell Robbie and Louis Gara reconvene; we met them in Rum Punch and they were played by Samuel L. Jackson and Robert De Niro respectively in Jackie Brown. Elmore Leonard, an ironist and a mischief-maker, definitely had fun writing. Character, milieu, dialogue, plotting: these, in a nutshell, are his forte. This is a writer in whose punchy vernacular to shoot someone with a shotgun is to “pump and bust him.” Trash culture, the sordid paperback or penny dreadful, tabloid titillation, pop art: yum, yes please. I don't know if Andy Warhol, producer of the movie Trash, was a Leonard fan, but, Christ, man, how could he not have been? The way to plot a page-turner is to keep the reader on the balls of they feet. Unknown Man No. 89 is an especially notable early Leonard crime yarn because of the sophistication of the plotting and because of its focus on alcoholism and recovery. This is also a darkly humorous novel not afraid to allow Virgil, a black underworld killer who wears a kind of stylish pimp stetson, to take a moment, breaking into a hotel room so as to steal all of a man’s papers and documents, to throw into the suitcase along with the designated spoils of the raid "a painting on the wall he liked of a cat out in a sailboat with the mast broken off and this terrible motherfucker storm coming at him. Virgil sat down and had his scotch and coke drink, wondering if the cat made it, then wondering where the cat had got the sailboat, if it was his or if he’d stolen it someplace and was trying to get away, shit, when the storm got him.” Bad guys up to bad business, but always this presiding, good-willed attention to the presiding human comedy, à la Balzac. This is the alchemist's gift of being able to make art of popular things. Elmore Leonard is also a more versatile writer than he is credited with being (doubtlessly on account of his best-selling popularity, equivalent to the adulterer’s branded A). Crime fiction usually functions and grabs us by presenting a kind of unobstructed heightened realism, as with writers as diverse as James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, and Patricia Highsmith. Leonard is more than merely adept respective of that particular mode. At the same time, you have something like 1980’s City Primeval, which is probably about as close as American fiction gets—this side of William S. Burroughs or Robert Coover—to Hieronymus Bosch. In point of fact, I subtly reference that berserker in the opening lines of the Shroud Shifter song “The Rocket”…  

Shroud Shifter, "The Rocket"

Motormouth Book Club: Fuzzy Peach Meridian

Unfortunately I was able; sadly, it was easy.
- William H. Gass, "The Master of Secret Revenges"

 

Next Up on the Docket

Hammett (Wim Wenders, 1982)

Henry & June (Philip Kaufman, 1990)

Naked Lunch (David Cronenberg, 1991)

Wonder Boys (Curtis Hanson, 2000)

Bright Star (Jane Campion, 2009)

"Karakkaze Yarō" 
Theme from the Movie Afraid to Die 
(Yasuzō Masumura, 1960)
Sung by Legendary Writer Yukio Mishima 

Sanctuary

 

Take the cotton
of the mind's doom-ridden chatter
out of your ears.
- Rumi

I miss friendship more than I miss sex. Rather, since I do not miss any particular actually existing friend, it is friendship in a more abstract or nebulous sense that I crave. There are people out there who lose the love of their life and do not subsequently love ever again. That isn’t my story. I stumbled through relationships like there was nothing at stake and my partners noticed. In the words of poet Marianne Moore: “the cure for loneliness is solitude.” In solitude we have the rich luck to commune with the heaving totalities. It’s the only actual way to do art. You need at the very least, like Virginia Woolf, a room of your own. “The measure in which your solitude is hard is the measure of the reward it offers,” writes Fenton Johnson in At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life. What did I do to receive this brute but noble gift? I became the person I was all along becoming. I could not have forced it, because I did not have any idea what I was doing. Did you? No supplementation is required and it is too stupid for words to outsource one's sense of worth to other people. Many days my recovery from addiction is almost entirely about dropping out of pulsed time so I can slow down and remember how to breathe like a creature. In a time that hovers I can attain my tenuous balance. In William T. Vollmann’s heartbreaking and intermittently brutal masterpiece The Lucky Star, the transwoman Judy, who has modelled herself after troubled superstar Judy Garland, but who does not pass and regularly feels like a freak, sees stardom and adulation as the only drugs that could possibly save a person like her. Romantic love has to be one kind of torment or another, and Judy has no shortage of proof. Humiliation is the cost of doing human exchange in any form heretofore known. “Just as the Wicked Witch of the West was the true friend who slipped Judy Garland her amphetamines on the set of The Wizard of Oz,” writes Vollmann, “it might fall out when Francine declined to play savior that Snake Goddess Shantelle supplied the other Judy with just the right happiness pills, thereby profiting not only in cash, but also in entertainment, because when the transwoman got high enough, whatever humiliations her loving public inflicted quickly slopped out of her consciousness, so that the fun could continue all night, in the spirit of children torturing a small animal for hours, careful not to let their victim escape into premature insensibility. To tell you the truth, this was more fun than Judy’s so-called act.” You court disaster when you face your public saturated in need and want, drugged so that you can handle the burn and the blowback. Neither Judy nor I ever figured out how to turn this infernal machine off so long as our public keeps looking at us with those prepossessing faces.

An Autobiographical Aside: Trauma and Hopelessness

 

Le jeune Ahmed (Jean Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2019)

On the first day of grade two at Woodlands Elementary school, the teacher Mrs. Templeton asked the class what we had gotten up to the previous summer. When it came to be my turn, I began to excitedly tell a longwinded story, which has always been among my favourite things to do. I had just started in with animated glee on a football game I had attended at McMahon Stadium, which has always been adjacent to Nick’s Steakhouse, which I thought was a really cool place, when out of nowhere Mrs. Templeton shut me down, moving on to the next student. This simply confirmed for me what I had already suspected: I was going to hate grade two as much as I’d hated grade one. Mrs. Templeton was a very large woman. Years later when I was working an office job downtown, a fun coworker of mine in her early thirties who had a Rottweiler and who I liked to hang out with told me that her boyfriend had gotten drunk one night and confessed that he used to pick up fat women so he could take them home and tit-fuck them. To each their own, I suppose. I never got the hang of being polite and ingratiating in the patented Canadian style. When I started drinking at the age of thirteen, I found that it numbed the pain, but it also made me giggle and talk even more. In high school, long before I was diagnosed with bipolar 1, I already realized that I was only able to be conventionally charming when I was depressed. Alcohol is a depressant, but it only makes you depressed unpredictably. An oldtimer in Alcoholics Anonymous once told me and a room full of my fellow alcoholics that the difference with being sick with alcoholism, which is a terminal condition if not treated, and being sick with cancer is that people sympathize with you when you have cancer. If you are an alcoholic they just think you are an asshole. Fair enough, I figured, I am very frequently an asshole. There was always a lot of trauma in my body and hopelessness in my soul. Put alcohol on top of that and it operates as an accelerant, liker gasoline on a fire. I was six-years-old when the Challenger disaster happened on live television and it traumatized me badly, largely because I had become a fan of Christa McAuliffe, the social studies teacher and non-astronaut who was sent along with the mission for public relations purposes. I am very glad that I did not know then what I found out the other day: the crew module survived the explosion and it is likely that everybody on board was alive for the nearly-three-minute plummet downward until they hit the water at terminal velocity. Even worse and more insane is the fact that originally they hadn't planned to send a charismatic civilian to teach lessons about space over video relays up there along with the professionals. They initially intended to send Sesame Street's Big Bird (the problem being that the eight-foot costume wouldn't fit in the module). If Big Bird had actually been in the Challenger when it exploded I simply would never have recovered. 

I was smoking too much cannabis for too long, starting approximately around the time I determined to set out to make my record Yevgenia, of which I still have a few hundred copies if you or your friends want one. I am legitimately still in cannabinoid withdrawal and last night I had a nightmare so intense it was more like sleep paralysis. I was basically asleep but I was desperately afraid somebody was going to break into the house and torture me for days. Suddenly I was driving down Elbow Drive south of Glenmore and flood waters were rapidly rising ahead of me so I had to turn the car around. In a flash I was in some ominous woods on foot then suddenly on my back with my feet shooting up in the air without my willing it or controlling it. I had the conscious thought that I might be dead and this might be the afterlife; I was absolutely humming with pure terror. Then I found myself at the door of a small house in the woods. There was a little handwritten note on the door that said, semi-legibly: what the fuck? I was too terrified to ring the bell or knock. I tried to say hello, but it came out as a barely audible wheeze. I woke with a start, shot out of bed, and said what the fuck? to nobody. Then I said: okay, I think I interpret this...if you are all alone by nature or design, however obnoxious and unbearable you may be, no matter how kind and considerate, then you are lost and have nobody. Please don't do that to me again...

Albert Ayler, "Bells," 1966

Things I Did Today

Only the Best Music Rocks My Casbah

Pookleberry Pie Goes to the Sinema

It was such a good and stimulating day that I had to come home and have an extended nap in the early evening. Now I’ll admit I dread a sleepless or at least turbulent night before my mother and I head to Drumheller tomorrow on family business. I had the Guadalajara omelette at Purple Perk, a personal favourite breakfast food indulgence, briefly hypnotized by the comely lady in yoga pants sitting, and periodically standing, directly in front of me. After that I drove north and attended my favourite weekly meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. It’s my favourite because there are lots of oldtimers there who know what they are talking about and who demonstrate each week without fail that it works if you work it. I’m not going to tell you what anybody said in the meeting because one of the central principles of these principle-rich twelve-step programs is: what happens in these rooms stays in these rooms. I think we can safely assume that this is the one thing David Foster Wallace forgot to jot down in that clandestine notebook of his when he was ‘researching’ Infinite Jest. You all presumably know that I’ve transgressed on this front myself, but in my defence I have for a good while believed that people in this day and age owe it to themselves and the general public to recover publicly, messily, and loud as all get-out. When I got home I consulted my blog and my YouTube channel to see how many people have hit up my latest posts, which made me sad, so I went and lay on the daybed in the phonograph room whilst spinning old-timey banjo music. When I had properly collected myself, I realized that the timing was perfect to go catch the second matinee of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Her Private Hell at the nearby mall. I not only liked this motion picture quite a bit, it’s definitely by far the best thing I’ve seen in the multiplex so far this year, not that that’s a huge achievement, God only knows. It played Cannes in May, but didn’t make the Official Competition, and it currently has a 42% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. (If you take Rotten Tomatoes seriously there can’t be any redeeming you #SorryNotSorry.) Though this new film is not quite so aggressively sickening as Only God Forgives (2013) or The Neon Demon (2016), you won’t have any trouble determining that this is the same director. It indisputably contains more ocular trauma than your average violent movie. It really is quite weird. You know what? It actually reminded me a little of the 2012 film adaptation of Cloud Atlas, which I have always argued is underrated. I also think that Winding Refn in certain set-pieces is paying conscious homage to the visual style of French director Bertrand Mandico, who is one year Winding Refn’s junior. I am pretty sure that Mandico’s 2016 short film Depressive Cop is one of the top ten short films of all time, surpassing all of David Lynch’s short films with the possible exception of Premonitions Following an Evil Deed from 1995. One peculiar and amusing creative decision in Her Private Hell was to appropriate the name Johnny Thunders in a manner analogous to how Harmony Korine appropriated Moondog in 2019’s The Beach Bum. I very much enjoyed watching Sophie Thatcher on screen with her crazy teeth and even thought at times that she was like a much less unhinged Paz de la Huerta. At any rate, surely now you can see why I needed that extended siesta! Some days life is just really, really fine and the gratitude slides on in easy as pie…

Self-Portrait I Did During My Last Stay in the Psych Ward

He feels the tone of devotion go straight to his heart, that gentle, unresisting despair, and the name that shakes him with emotion strikes at his very soul.
- Stefan Zweig, "A Story Told in Twilight"

Then she walked away, skin crawling at this brush of his wings. She was entirely uncertain if she was widening the distance.

- Thomas McGuane, The Cadence of Grass

 

The Polio Vaccine

 

François Boucher, Resting Girl, 1752 

When I was a young Turk talking endless pretentious shit over pints of lager and pursuing only the lankiest young ladies, long of leg and fundamentally amoral in constitution, I said I didn’t ever want to be married because the whole institution of marriage was an anachronistic relic left over from feudalism. It should basically go without saying that I also didn’t want to have children. When people say to me that it is unethical to bring children into this world because it is a cruel place that we’ve just about completely ruined, I still have to agree with them in theory, but for whatever reason in my early forties I started to sort of obsess about perhaps having missed my opportunity to sire offspring, the passing on of my genetic information probably the only vehicle for provisional immortality available to me at this point. I started dating a younger actress I met on the set of a small indie film in Toronto for which I was director of photography and at the time I was conscious of selecting her by virtue of her being in possession of working reproductive equipment. Alas, at the end of shoot she went to Milan and I went to Vancouver. Not a month later we were all in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and then a protracted lockdown that I had to suffer in solitude and which rattled me more than I was able I think to apprehend at the time.  

It gradually became apparent to me during lockdown, the entirety of which I spent in my small condo in Olympic Village, that I was becoming more disordered in my thinking and that the space I inhabited gradually grew to reflect this. Normally I am a fastidious and orderly person to the extent that people sometimes comment upon it outright, sometimes even assuming erroneously that I’m homosexual. I also grew bitter with people in my life, more or less ceasing to communicate with family or any of my old friends, building grievances in my mind that I can see now did not have a whole lot of legitimacy. The exception was a pair of former colleagues in the film industry who regularly sent me screeners of recent international films. I watched movies daily, and it is to this small felicity that I attribute whatever sanity I was able to retain through this minor ordeal that I suppose I could not help but blow up into something bigger than it needed to be. Whenever I thought about women with whom I’d been in longterm relationships or who I’d believed I loved, it struck me that all of them had left once they got bored and that they’d only ever appreciated me in the first place because I was above average in the looks department and was a capable professional who projected confidence.

Though this wasn’t like me at all, my having no track record of this sort of thing, really, once lockdown measures finally relaxed a little the first thing I did was start looking up sex workers online. Naturally, I’d been vaccinated in compliance with the protocols. It was a kind of peculiar mania rather than routine horniness. Eventually I settled on a young, curvaceous woman going by the name of Autumn. She was a brunette, which was basically the only prerequisite from my standpoint, and she did out calls. I wasn’t about to go to some strange place. It may sound silly, but looking back I realize that I was still thinking about the possibly of becoming a father and desperately wanted to confirm that my own equipment was still up to par. I sent Autumn a text and she called me back on my cell rather quickly. She said she charged $300.00 for an hour, cash upfront, and that she could see me in an hour-and-a-half. I asked her if she would supply the condom and she said of course. At a good brisk pace, I walked to the convenience store down the street and took $500.00 out of the ATM.

When I met Autumn at the front doors to my building she looked up at me with surprise. I assumed it was just because I’m a good deal taller than the average guy. She was absolutely lovely. I had placed the $500.00 on the counter in my kitchen and when we got to my unit I gave her a little space so she’d feel secure and told her, pointing toward the money, that there was the agreed-upon $300.00 plus a $200.00 tip, but that I wasn’t expecting anything unusual or especially kinky. She gave me a somewhat circumspect grin. Then I invited her over to the couch for a quick chat before we proceeded with things. I asked her what she was passionate about and she immediately said horses. It turns out that her main hobby was dressage. She knocked me aback a little when she told me that she was about to start medical school and that she had not gotten the COVID vaccine largely because she has a tendency to react perversely to being told what to do, and because for the vaccine to work at all effectively they only had to give it to a large part of the population, not literally everybody. I asked her if she’d seen clients during the lockdown and she said far fewer than normal, primarily because most of the guys seemed to have  become squirrely and frightening. At this point something sort of odd happened. Autumn began talking about the polio vaccine. Vaccination works by conditioning the immune system with an immunogen. The development of immunity to polio efficiently blocks person-to-person transmission of polio virus, protecting individual vaccine recipients as well as the wider community. The development of two polio vaccines led to the first modern mass inoculations. The first effective polio vaccine was developed in 1952 by Jonas Salk and a team at the University of Pittsburgh. In April 1955, after mass polio vaccination began in the United States, the Surgeon General began to receive reports of patients who’d contracted paralytic polio shortly after being vaccinated with the Salk polio vaccine—from the Cutter pharmaceutical company—with the paralysis starting in the limb into which the vaccine was injected.

When we got to the bedroom she ordered me to get naked and lie on the bed, sort of in the manner of a strict school teacher sick of your shit. I complied. First she stimulated with her hands and then orally. She affixed the condom to my erect member and asked if there was a position I’d prefer. I said I’d like to try cowgirl, so she got up on top of me and went to work. Before too long it became clear that she was a little annoyed that I had not yet ejaculated. Probably most guys go off in thirty seconds. Her cellphone was beside her on the bed and at a certain point she began to pick it up intermittently and even to shoot off quick texts. It didn’t bother me much because I figured she was merely reassuring her pimp or security detail as to her safety. And fuck it, right? I’ll last as long as I last, I figured. I paid for my hour and then some. Eventually she stopped scowling and began to chuckle a little to herself. After I finally managed to ejaculate, she asked me if I ever do threesomes. She took the condom with her to the bathroom directly adjoining the bedroom and while she was in there I could actually hear her laughing.  

Duke Ellington, "Autumn Serenade," 1945

Top Ten Classical Blues Guitarists of the Early Recording Era

 

Mississippi Fred McDowell

Charlie Patton

Robert Johnson

Mississippi John Hurt

Furry Lewis

Bukka White

Blind Lemon Jefferson

Blind Willie McTell

Son House

Sleepy John Estes

Furry Lewis and Bukka White,  St. Louis 1973

* Essentially, by 'early recording era' we mean the 1920s and 1930s. 

Weird Bach: Fashion Icon

 

I am wearing a shirt from R2 Amsterdam and the pants are A Fish Named Fred (no joke, Google it). I made one of my regular trips to the Chinook Centre shopping mall for New York Fries poutine and a Score Blizzard from Dairy Queen. It remains my firm conviction that the Chinook Centre food court is the best place for 'people watching' in all of Western Canada. I mean...if you like your 'people watching' good and greasy...

Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, "Ice Cream for Crow" [Official Video]