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]

On Anarchism

 

Peter Kropotkin

Emma Goldman

Gleaning a few grains of influence from Hilda Hilst, that great and towering Brazilian madwoman of letters, I would like to begin by asking rhetorically whether a dog—any given dog—is a happy, slobbery, gadabout anarchist. A dog doesn’t have much need for entrenched order because a dog shows up amenable and almost excessively prepared in all earnestness for whatever mess or revelry immediately awaits. A dog doesn’t bother thinking life too far beyond how life innately presents. If anarchism is first of all a methodology or ontology or even a metaphysics, it can only ever be tangled up in ideology secondarily. If it has to have an ideology, anarchism invariably ends up twinning itself with grassroots socialism, this business primarily being one of collectivized labour and equitable distribution of profits. The smaller your population the easier this is going to be to manage and administrate. The Mennonites and the Hutterites have probably done as good a job as any, though I guess some hippies of the drop-out ethos made a go of more or less operational communes here and there, learning to fix tractors and grow whatever they could eat and/or sell. This was back when the Age of Aquarius was coming but didn’t. The chronologically second of the two great Russian forefathers of modern anarchism after Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin is widely quoted as having said something in Russian along the lines of: “Competition is the law of the jungle, but cooperation is the law of civilization.” This is how us anarchist folk believe human society ought to function. However, it really should be clear to everybody that, just like the Age of Aquarius, civilization still hasn’t arrived.

Kropotkin was a descendent of aristocrats and he believed in decentralization, self-governing communities, and worker-run enterprises…just like contemporary Canadian activist author Naomi Klein (she of No Logo renown). The exiled and formerly-imprisoned Kropotkin went back to Russia after the October Revolution of 1917 and when he watched Lenin and his Bolshevik cronies build a clumsy top-down version of state-controlled capitalism under the pretence of later inaugurating a “dictatorship of the proletariat” that everybody including Leon Trotsky knew was horseshit, he actually became depressed and hopeless rather than disgusted or incensed. The October Revolution itself had been pure anarchy, but what happened afterward was nothing short of a historic catastrophe from which the world is still reeling. In his wonderful and disorienting book October: The Story of the Russian Revolution, author China Miéville attributes to the emergent technology of trains the collapse of the Czarist regime and the outrageous bedlam that followed. Though some anarchist revolutionaries were briefly held in high regard—like Iosif Bleikhman, “a fiery, unkempt, charismatic figure who spoke his native Russian with what Trotsky described as a ‘Jewish-American accent’ which his audiences enjoyed”—the vast majority of anarchists who participated in the October Revolution ended up dead, imprisoned, or in exile. There would appear to be a very harsh lesson here: only the skeeziest bottom-feeders ever seem to possess that special yen for seizing power.

This infernal revolution of October 1917 did not just pop off like a flashbulb out of nowhere. Radical politics had been building and covertly circulating in Czarist Russia for a good century beforehand, and Russia is indeed a very special case in this respect. Anybody who knows about the life of Fyodor Dostoevsky knows that he came traumatically close to being executed by firing squad for his involvement with subversive organizations. In the 1830s and 1840s, Ivan Turgenev, who shares my birthday, belonged to the same intellectual circles as future radical icons like Mikhail Bakunin and Vissarion Belinsky, and he would later address the drama and danger of the underground revolutionary existence in his elegant but extremely daring 1877 novel Virgin Soil, available to English readers in a wonderful translation from New York Review Books. Even the lion of Russian literature, Leo Tolstoy, practiced a form of Christian Anarchism, refusing to participate in state institutions—courts, the military, even taxation—leaving behind the legacy of a vast agrarian communal system to bind his followers and devotees in Christ.

Adapting and running with an old theme prevalent in the counterculture of the late 1960s, Canadian ‘green architect’ Jason F. McLennan writes that “the way to subvert the dominant paradigm is to have more fun than they do and make sure they know it.” Whether McLennan knows it or not—I’m guessing he does—he is also echoing supreme anarchist exemplar Emma Goldman who purportedly insisted in the early 1930s: “If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.” The subversion of the dominant paradigm has so far in history meant that whatever power apparatus is next on the docket will likewise have to be robustly subverted. If you cannot take pleasure in your work and your sabotage, or in your fellows and your comrades, then the mischief you believe you are up to cannot possibly be worthy of the energy and effort it taxes. “Every society,” writes Goldman, “has the criminals it deserves.”