Now Feel This
Fourteen degrees and I don’t feel a thing. No cold. No brace. No wind. I don’t feel empathy; I don’t feel compassion; I don’t feel hurt. I don’t feel like feeling at all.
I am numb to my skull.
Another Monday done. Real done. Real done gone. That makes, what, 200? Something like that. I don’t feel like adding ‘em up, ‘cause I don’t feel like punching myself in the face. Again.
No feel to be felt and no view to be beheld, I turn elsewhere. Not in, where I might find out more than I scare to know, and not here, where there’s nothing to be found, but beyond, to the world of image and angle and letter and be. A World with a View.
I turn to Nick Arvin’s
Articles of War and I get pissed at the invertebrated cowardice of a grunt called Heck. What unmitigated whimpery, what foulful fear, what a despicable display of derring-don‘t.
And how cunning the reveal. Keen to lay way bare the deep, dark recesses of a soul shallowed with cower, to make of your hero a redeemless pathetic. Like M. Gira’s
The Coward (which left me so mad I wanted to go out and stomp someone), Arvin’s
Articles provokes a visceral stir; a boil and a hate yes, but more a primal promise to never, ever succumb to the horrors.
In other words, to feel. Almost.
Monday Almighty
Monday Monday. Be good to me. Be damn good. Be right. I’ve done what needed to be done, and then some. Then I did some more. The dues have been paid. Thrice. So have the debts. Well, the big one anyway. The one that called for a fat chunk of my life.
Fifty-two months, less ten days. That’s how much a chunk I’ll’ve surrendered to this State if they spring me this very aft. Do the math. Or, better yet, don’t. ’Cause it might just break your heart.
I know it broke mine. Into a true million little pieces. No DUI guy I. Not even close. I went whole hog and fell full throttle. Which of course doesn’t begin to explain anything. It couldn’t, ‘cause this is the kinda it that can’t be explained.
Nor can it be healed with tears and woe and regret. Yeah, I broke my heart. Broke it bitter. But I didn’t break my spirit. Nor did I break my soul. Neither did the State, though they sure as hell tried.
So what? Do the crime… But my time here’s done. I’ve served. None too proudly and under a barrage of continuous hail. Now I’m a fellow well set. Ready for my Next Last Chance. All I require is permission to get back on the game board.
Monday, be damn good to me. You won’t regret it.
The Big Queasy
I get queasy. Real queasy. Like some sap who can’t handle his sentiment; a cat that can’t stomach its quick. A hollow wells up from my gut and into my throat, craws to a halt, right where they say the frogs dwell.
But this is no frog.
It is reptilian. Where the frog broke off. Something elemental and blooded cold. A snap from evolution’s intermission. This must be what the dinosaurs felt thresheld at the exit, on the verge of no more, when every gasp was the last.
Watching Antione receive his umpteenth of
Four Hundred Blows I catch my heart in my head, sneaking like the thief that it is. Poor, brave
Antione. Wagoned away in a cage like some safari capture, another beast being led to the slaughterhouse. I know how he feels to know the next many minutes of your life will be handled by handlers who at best have perfunctory interests. I know how it feels to have to kiss the world goodbye.
Or Bernadette or Rose or Margaret sent away to fray with
The Magdalene Sisters.
Margaret ’cause she was raped by a cousin;
Rose for abornin’ out of wedlock;
Bernadette simply for talking to boys. How gruesomely ghastly a pogrom it was. Girls exiled in “secure accommodation” so as not to serve as temptation to the worst of Ireland’s men.
Obscene.
Intolerance 2
In yesterday’s haste to get the blog out before my House-imposed deadline, I missed getting in a couple further developments in the Reign of Intolerance:
First, the caricature-blamed death toll in Nigeria now stands at well over a hundred, with the Christian Ibos (
Igbos) now taking the lead over the Muslim
Hausas in the repercussive killings. Seems mad members of both factions were looking for a convenient excuse to spill blood.
Second comes this unnerving nugget, again courtesy of the Grey Lady:
Millions Offered to Murder Leading Indian ArtistA militant Hindu activist organization has offered $11.5 million for the murder of India's best-known artist, Maqbool Fida Hussain, 90, Agence France-Presse reported. Objecting to what it called "obscene paintings" of goddesses, the organization, the Hindu Personal Law Board, said the amount would be doubled if the slaying was done by Yaqoob Qureshi, a Muslim politician who announced an identical reward for the beheading of the 12 artists responsible for cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad. "We do not distinguish between Islam and Hinduism," said Ashok Pandey, the president of the board. Earlier this month, protests by militant Hindus prompted Mr. Husain to withdraw a depiction of Bharat Mata (Mother India) as a nude woman from sale at a charity auction. Similar paintings by Mr. Hussain have prompted protests in the past.Guess something’s gotta galvanize a little Muslim/Hindu togetherness. Too bad it’s something -- and someone -- intolerant and reactionary. Quite clever for the Board to call on Qureshi to do the killing; makes ‘em look like they’ve got their arms outreached, when really it’s only their hate.
Finally, a
Comment came through from one
xradiographer, who chimed in with criticism of the West’s muzzling of
David Irving. Now, like the
X man, I’m no fan of the Great Denier, but I’d never in a million years deny him his right to deny anything, and I sure as hell wouldn’t jail him for his denials. The guy wants to be ignorant, let him be ignorant. To wring the words of another
notorious anti-Semite: he is bunk.
Intolerance
Crybabies. The whole wild world’s drowning in crybabies. Muslim mobs, all aroar over a misdepiction of Mohammed, cry ten dead in Libya, fifteen dead in Nigeria, cry threats and promises of more deaths to come. All because of a couple crass cartoons.
How strong your god if he can’t even stand up to caricature?
And now, cribbed from Tuesday’s
Times, three -- count ’em -- more instances of crybaby oversensitivity: Roman Catholic bishops in New Zealand calling for a
South Park boycott because a new episode depicts a statute of a bleeding
Virgin Mary; Britain’s
Hindu Forum denouncing the popular French comedy
Les Bronzes 3: Amis Pour La Vie" ("The Sun-Tanned Ones 3: Friends for Life") -- which set a record for an opening weekend in France -- ’cause it shows images of the Hindu god
Lord Shiva being torn up; and Cocuk-Der, a nongovernmental children’s welfare organization in Turkey, bringing suit to halt screenings of
Valley of the Wolves — Iraq, a hugely popular Turkish film that depicts American troops in Iraq as villains.
Of course Turkey has already garnered no small renown for it’s persecuting of its scribes, most infamously
Orhan Pamuk, who should be considered a national teasure; and
Naguib Mafouz in Egypt and
Theo Van Gogh in the Netherlands both ran afoul of the crybabies, the latter lethally so.
What gives? Are we getting too close for tolerance? Me thinks Johnson and Johnson needs to start sending out emergency shipments of Baby Shampoo so we might have No More Tears.
And no more Intolerance.
Gunn Clubbing
Smokey and quick, like a split lip with style. With a cool jazz soundtrack, a swing and a sway that won’t quit, can’t quit, is unquiting and unquitable. I blog of one Gunn,
Peter Gunn, habitue of
Mother’s, object of
Edie’s desire, infamous on high and intimate of low life everywhere. And unlike
Moore as
The Saint,
Craig Stevens does his own ass-kicking.
Brilliant, despite -- or maybe because of -- casting
Gavin McLeod as a crime boss (“The Kill”). Effulgent, like lensed crime itself. Gunn is how a Hollywoodic checkered past tastes and smells and looks and feels. Now if only all the wild world’s ills could be resolved in the span of a show time.
Perhaps they can. With The Strip.
Cookie, I'm stealin' your comb.
Before I go-go, I gotta backhand it to The Saint, or at least to
John Gilling, the cat who put some of the words in his mouth. Yeah, Moore’s mild-tempered Templar had bad poofy hair, never did his own stunts and was cursed with patently fake locations, but he was stylized and mannered and well-tailored and at times storyfic. More he was rendered delightfully eruditions, as when alluding to
Francois Villon in “The King of the Beggars.”
Now, I’m almost embarrassed to admit that Villon was known to me only in passing, but from what I glean he was the 15th c’s version of street lit. A cat who’d been bad, done worse, and scribbled it all down, in the hyper-colored vernacular of the day.
Thanks, Simon. I owe you one.
A Saintless Spider with his Quills
Now I’m no Saint, hell, I’m not even a
Roger Moore, but I know to what it takes to be unholy, and I know what it means to be a bad actor, or at least a mannerly imitation of one. Scanning early episodes of
The Saint left me at once intrigued and asleep, with visions that lead me to believe I can do it leaner, meaner, even, perhaps keener. Now, in a whole wild new world.
If I ever get back to it.
And like
McGrath’s
Spider, as lensed by
Cronenberg and portrayed by
Fiennes, I shall ghost the delusions of my past and come to some kinda truth, no matter how bitter and brutal and ugly the reveal.
And, like
De Sade, and as he’s so bedevilishly played by
Geoffrey Rush in
Philip Kaufman’s body-ripping filmery, I shall do it with
Quills. Or, if need be, the blood and the shit of my soul.
Was De Sade a monster? Depends on who you ask. He was monstrously brave and unequivocal. He didn’t bend, he never wavered, and he could not be broken. A cruel irony that the proceeds of his liberating scribbles would be used to further confine.
That mistake shall not be made thrice.
Toil & Trouble
It could be anywhere, any nowhere that is. Like right around the bend from here. The place of no station. The waylay of the land. Where life's just an interruption between the main events of birth and death.
It is that bleak.
I blog of
Bubble, Soderbergh's well-chronicled foray into the belly of a beastly Middle America. No actor could portray such stunning inconsequence 'cause no actor could ever imagine such inconsequence lives, so Soderbergh let the lives portray themselves.
And what bland lives they follow. Fast food and slow motion, a yawn amid slumber. The color of straw and half as tasty, a third as nutritious, a quarter as eventful. Lives of no joy, no hope, no glory.
Which seems to be the dull point. Bubble blows one away. Not outta the seat, mind you. But like dust is blown across a parking lot. This is the way many we live now. For worse.
Know this.
Betwixt the Between
Sunday morning coming down. Way down. Down to the last drop. Gone. The sun rises, high and bright, but still just enough to bright the bitter, to highlight the slippery spots. That‘s all the muscle it‘s got. I know how that old sun feels: Too distant for warmth, too seldom for belief, a cruel joke on a cold, cold heart.
The folk in these hills care for no such sun, for no sun at all. The few times it has shone of late they’ve cowered for cover beneath any available shadow. I expect today’s shining will provoke similar retreats. The frigid won’t help. Maybe these folk get their warmth elsewhere, or maybe, just maybe, they’re afraid of what a little illumination might wring.
Like in Polanski’s
The Lamp, one of his beautifully shadowed shorts shot while at the State Film School at Lodz. An old man in an old shop with some old dolls. Digging in their skulls, tweaking their limbs, remaking the remodels, all by lamplight.
Then comes electricity, in with the illuminated new. So-called progress. The mysteries reveal themselves, ugly and dangerous and in no need of man-made illumination.
Careful what you shine the light on.
Preceded by the quick little kill of
Murder,
Teeth Smile, a study in peepology,
Break Up the Dance, with its Derenesque frenzy,
Two Men and a Wardrobe, which nods to Chaplin and Lloyd, and
When Angels Fall, his thesis, and the inner life of an invisible
Post grad comes keen with
The Fat and the Lean. Things can always be worse. Then
Mammals slaps ticklish, and leads sway to…
Knife in the Water, a concoction of character and claustrophobia, where the pesky Pole leaves the Great Dane Dreyer and puts Hitchcock in a threesome. Or something. Else. Man against man, and the woman knows all.
But of course.
Swellville
An old young man, legend of a recent past. Just like J.P. Melville's
Bob le Flambeur. A gambler, yes. A gadabout town. A gadfly in the ointment. Nervy and nuisant. Suited and slung low, in a sweet rag-topped chariot.
On the Strip I am It and It is me. Swagger. A dagger through the muddy crystalline. With a bip and a bop that won't quit. Can't quit. I wear the most confident mask ego can buy.
Feel the fond. Model bookers and club promoters, keepers of shop and saloon, petty thieves and gangsters, junkies and thugs, those who do, those who don't, none who won't, given the chance. They love me and I love them.
Only I love me more. Much more. And they don't love me half as much as I believe. If my handshakes and hugs have ulterior motives, my smile is a lie of the mind, stands to damn good reason that their moves too mean something else. A hustler's currency. Tricks of the trade.
All will be well in Swellville.
Something Urbane This Way Makes
Lax even in my lapse, I let the Viewlessness get to me. Or worse, not get to me at all. I sit. And I stir. And I yawn for the day when I too shall be released back into the thick of all things.
And sometimes, even if I can’t see the city for the hills, something urbane this way comes. Today was that kinda sometime, when a bolt from a ‘burg far from this no home came my way. I blog of one
Lynne D. Johnson, a dame who really knows how to make a Hood’s dogged day, however inadvertently the make.
Today Ms. J
writes of
Relentless Aaron, that most-fittingly monikered purveyor of street lit. Those of you in my know are aware of RA’s
six-figure deal with Harper Collins. You’re also aware of my strong taste for all that’s grit in lit, and my extreme distaste for those who’d spit it down and out.
Like a certain hack named Nick Chiles, who’s Times
piece sparked my own
Pressing, much of which was whittled from an even more vociferous scolding (see below). Lady J was kind enough to cite my slighting, and I in turn shall be forever grateful for the citing.
Kudos and cred to LDJ, Relentless A, and all the others who don't wait for the door to open but instead choose to kick it in.
I hope Ninny Nick Chiles is listenin.'
