Um.
So, it’s been a crazy month, September. Stupid busy. Did I miss anything?
You cannot fully understand Colin Meloy’s art unless you know that he is white.
Oh, yes: from the Hans Christian Kalevala murder-ballad that falls into the chilliest lullaby I’ve heard in a good long while, to the endless sloppy drunken jam-band encore we finally (cheerfully) walked out on (“Wooden Ships on the Water,” Jenn informs me; my education is lacking in some odd respects)—the piercing cry of “Sing O muse of the passion of the pistol!” over a fleshy Talking Heads vamp—the majesty of the Crane Wife herself, with that syncopated oceanic lurch of the band in the chorus that shakes the foundations out from under your moving feet—oh, yes. It’s going to be a good one.
Catechism.
“I’m not making a joke. You know me; I take everything so seriously. If we wait for the time till our souls get it right, then at least I know there’ll be no nuclear annihilation in my lifetime.” —Me, I’m still not right neither. Further bulletins soon enough. (I’d thought my anger at the traffic hot enough, but then I saw the Yes on 43: Protect Teen Girls bumper sticker. Such filthy eloquence! Her ears would have been flensed from her skull, had our windows been rolled down, were we not been traveling at such wind-whipping speeds. —I’m sleepy, and punch-drunk; hurry home, Jenn. The cats won’t leave me alone, and the words aren’t doing what I want them to.)
We wish to register a complaint.
Since when did y’all let new car keys get so dam’ bulky?
The golden age of analog sci-fi.
Matt Zoller Seitz on the awful, awful Trek cosmetic.
Torture, working.
Since the Moscow trials of the ’thirties, in which so many of the Old Bolsheviks confessed to almost every possible crime—an actual majority of the Bolshevik Central Committee that had made the October Revolution were capitalist agents if the evidence given at the trials was to be believed—we have all grown considerably more sceptical about evidence extracted under torture. There is a remarkable similarity between, for example, a young German girl of the sixteenth century confessing that, naked, she had attended the Sabbath and there indulged in every variety of perversion and some of the confessions produced at the Moscow trials. One remembers that one of the Moscow accused confessed, in a fervour of self-recrimination, to having met and plotted with Trotsky at the Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen although, in reality, the hotel had been burnt down some years before; this is very like the fervent repentance displayed by some accused witches for impossible supernatural crimes to which they had confessed.
—Fancis King, Sexuality, Magic, & Perversion
It still stops me, gobsmacked, on the street, when the thought crosses my mind: I live in a country that seriously argues whether torture is justifiable.
How thin and threadbare civilization is.
Remember this: they tell us our constitution is not a “suicide pact,” that give me liberty or give me death be damned, some things are more important. —Such as keeping them in power. That, it seems, is worth dying for.
“Self-correcting blogosphere,” my ass.
Three days I’ve had “onamatopoetic” down there. Three days. And not one of you said a goddamn thing. (And anyway, the actual “onomatopoeic” is even better rhythmically than my oh-so-cleverly factured “onomatopoetic,” to spell it properly.) —Is this thing on?
Location, location, location.
I was wondering what Pitchfork had to say about the new Mountain Goats, so I went to my browser bar and started typing—
Appositional.
This isn’t a picture of Wormwood.
I’m not sure why I keep coming back to the decadent espionage thrillers of the ’70s for popcorn reading, these days. Maybe because we were much more sophisticated then? We handled it all—oil crises, Mideast flareups, terrorist hijackings, the existential struggle of the individual against an inevitable subsumption within this bureaucratic matrix, or that—we handled it all with so much more aplomb then than now, it seems. (This is as false as any other comparison of one decade to another. Allow me a minor pecadillo.) —I’m not sure why I keep coming back to Trevanian and MacBeth, in particular. The one so appallingly heartsick beneath its po-faced satire; the other so inadvertently ridiculous beneath its literary pretensions. (That one still managing to naught itself in the belly of the whale Annihilation, but I’m inexcusably referencing an inside joke hermetically sealed. —The first, of course, seeks to return to God by moving shibumily with God, knowing all the while it never can, but like I said, inexcusable, and dragging God into this will not help.)
It?
He? His? (She, hers?) (Penn’s?) —Both of them, of course, united in their queerly doomed battles, taking up the master’s tools against that 20th century grotesque, Bond. James Bond—
The explosions going off today world wide have been smoldering on a long sexual and emotional fuse. The terrorist has been the subliminal idol of an androcentric cultural heritage from prebiblical times to the present. His mystique is the latest version of the Demon Lover. He evokes pity because he lives in death. He emanates sexual power because he represents obliteration. He excites with the thrill of fear. He is the essential challenge to tenderness. He is at once a hero of risk and an antihero of mortality.
He glares out from reviewing stands, where the passing troops salute him. He strides in skintight black leather across the stage, then sets his guitar on fire. He straps a hundred pounds of weaponry to his body, larger than life on the film screen. He peers down from huge glorious-leader posters, and confers with himself at summit meetings. He drives the fastest cars and wears the most opaque sunglasses. He lunges into the prize-fight ring to the sound of cheers. Whatever he dons becomes a uniform. He is a living weapon. Whatever he does at first appalls, then becomes faddish. We are told that women lust to have him. We are told that men lust to be him.
We have, all of us, invoked him for centuries. Now he has become Everyman. This is the democratization of violence.
That isn’t a picture of Wormwood, either. (It may or may not be a picture of Jerry Cornelius, but then most things are. I can’t decide, though, if it’s a picture of Mister Six, or King Mob. It must be one or the other, right?)
But this isn’t about that; not yet, anyway. It’s mostly about Wormwood. Or at least the last few paragraphs of his life. —I was 11 or 12, and looking for something to read, and picked up The Eiger Sanction, because, hey, more spies. And was introduced in the opening bit to the hapless Wormwood, whose foolishness, while contemptible, still seemed to draw an undeserved measure of scorn from the ostensibly neutral third-person omniscient. What a prick, I said to myself, taking Wormwood’s side against a narrator he would never know. (And thereby learning a lesson it would take years to recognize.)
But, as I said, his last few paragraphs in this vale of tears:
As he climbed the dimly lit staircase with its damp, scrofulous carpet, he reminded himself that “winners win.” His spirits sank, however, when he heard the sound of coughing from the room next to his. It was a racking, gagging, disease-laden cough that went on in spasms through the night. He had never seen the old man next door, but he hated the cough that kept him awake.
Standing outside his door, he took the bubble gum from his pocket and examined it. “Probably microfilm. And it’s probably between the gum and the paper. Where the funnies usually are.”
His key turned in the slack lock. As he closed the door behind himself, he breathed with relief. “There’s no getting around it,” he admitted. “Winners—”
But the thought choked in mid-conception. He was not alone in the room.
With a reaction the Training Center would have applauded, he popped the bubble gum, wrapper and all, into his mouth and swallowed it just as the back of his skull was crushed in. The pain was very sharp indeed, but the sound was more terrible. It was akin to biting into crisp celery with your hands over your ears—but more intimate.
Damn.
Okay, “but more intimate” is arguably overkill, but still: Jesus. I shuddered (then and now) and dropped the book and haunted for years by that onomatopoeic image, I didn’t pick up Trevanian again until high school, when I read Shibumi, and kept saying, damn, this is like The Ninja, only better.
Yes. Yes, it is.
Doing the only right thing is sick, twisted; not referred to as a joke; not (at all) funny.
A note on framing, to our esteemed colleagues on the dextral side:
While I question the wisdom of rolling out a new product in August, still, I gotta tell you, I’m wholly in agreement with your impending shift from “MSM media” to “527 media.” After all, anyone outside your little clique who stumbles over such a reference and goes googling for whatever the hell it is you could possibly mean will trip over far and away the most famous 527 of all: the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. —And that, my friends, is a connection we can all support.
As you know, Bob.
One might think that the Laws of Probability would mandate that, without any intelligent input, 50% of the time the events in our world would lead to benefits for mankind. In a strictly mechanical way, life in our world ought to have manifested a sort of “equilibrium.” Factoring in intelligent decisions to do good might bring this average up to about 70%. That would mean that humanity would have advanced over the millennia to a state of existence where good and positive things happen in our lives more often than “negative” or “bad” things. In this way, many of the problems of humanity would have been effectively solved. War and conflict would be a rarity, perhaps 70% of the earth’s population would have decent medical care, a comfortable roof over their heads, and sufficient nutritious food so that death by disease and starvation would be almost unheard of. In other words, human society would have “evolved” in some way, on all levels.
The facts are, however, quite different.
—Laura Knight-Jadczyk, The Secret History of the World and How to Get Out Alive
An industrial seashell.
They’re hollowing out the upper floors of the Meier & Frank across the street from our office, “they” being NUPRECON, which probably stood for something at one point before it got all “Nu” on us. (I notice they also did for the Danmoore Hotel, on which more later.) —They’ve bolted a giant sheet-metal chute to the front of the building, braced by a webwork of scaffolding, with openings at every floor through which they lustily toss two-by-fours and chunks of drywall and metal brackets and pieces of concrete flooring and ripped-out electrical ducting and pipes and I don’t know what-all else to tumble booming down the chute and crash into the concrete bunkers at street level where backhoes scoop it up into battered containers and there’s the guy whose job it is to hose the whole thing down to keep the gypsum dust and other particulates from choking passers-by. Before today, it was an occasional event, whenever somebody on the sixth or the eighth floor got a load large enough to dump; we’d hear the intial boom and crash of a drop on its way down and apologize to whomever on the phone, hold up our meeting, look away from the computer screen, suspend all conversation for the half-minute or so it took the reverberations to die away. But today? Today they’re really into it. Load after load after load going down. Our only defense is to pretend we’re at the beach, and it’s the crashing surf we’re hearing—the crashing, clanging, thumping, banging surf.
A thoroughly self-indulgent post
pointing out that episode one of City of Roses finished today; episode two begins Monday, and runs Monday-Wednesday-Friday for the next two weeks. So there’s that. —Also, if you haven’t been checking out the news over there, you probably missed some lovely photos from the Portland Zine Symposium, which mostly taken by Matt Nolan and Erika Moen. So there’s that, too.
Shorter How to Talk to a Conservative:
