So, I have wracked my brain for over two months trying to write a fake review for a movie. I think my main problem was that I was seeking a narrative; there’s something about contextualizing your thoughts within a story that, not only makes it easier to assimilate, but if you’re writing it, insulates you from the sharp edges reality presents. As long as you can fictionalize things, I think you have a certain hope, even if it is false hope –which is the best kind- it’s still there, on your shoulder as you write.
So, I’m wracking my brains, and occasionally writing about “transgressive” literature, specifically Peter Sotos, whose books I have not read. One problem is that you cannot substitute something that interests, or even intrigues you into a narrative; those things are great to add into a strong or even mediocre narrative, but decompose any piece they are based on.
So, even though I need a narrative, I’m still reviewing movies I haven’t seen, sometimes letting the ideas in the trailers spin themselves out in an abstract way. Sometimes not even mentioning the movie. Troy writes these reviews too. We ARE going to compile them into a book: The Toten Book. I capitalize ‘are’ because I am determined to see this project through, even though it’s lost steam over the last two years. Needless to say it will most likely be self-published. Actually, it will definitely be self-published. Writing those words right now, I’m struck by how expensive that could be. I’m really trying to not spend money right now. Seriously. I’ve been listening to a lot of Townes Van Zandt lately, and mentally preparing myself for a life of abject and terminal poverty.
So, instead of some pretentious quote I might have used from the ‘failed’ reviews I will just let Townes add:
“Tell my friends I’m fine, not using nothin’… I don’t need nothin’”
So, that expresses pretty much how I’m expecting to live my life. Please interpret those lyrics as fatalistically as you want. A part of me has wanted to go into the monastery, which I know would be a cowardly thing to do, probably the most cowardly thing I could ever do, an absolute betrayal of all reason and conviction. Trading my entire sense of self for escape. I discovered today -after reading it of course- that the most important faculty we have at our disposal is whichever faculty of our mind it is that allows us to forget. Forgetfulness, even though we dread it in so many ways is our true Grace. Think of everytime you’ve taken LSD and the way your mind toys with delayed recognition; stretching the moment of recognition out to a point unthinkable by normal standards. The closest you can get with normal perception would be déjà vu I guess. My brief acid impression would be: “oh yeah this song is still playing! Oh yeah that wall is still there! Oh yeah the lights are still on!” Maybe LSD makes everything ‘recognizable’.
So, Troy was/is supposed to write the introduction for The Toten Book. Did I mention that ‘toten’ is German for ‘death’? All the reviews, or at least most of them involve death, specifically suicide. When I decided to scrap the old reviews I wanted to really excoriate myself as a penance for having written so much pretentious crap; and to cleanse myself of the pretentious crap; and of course to demonstrate that you can write honestly and still not reveal anything. Reveal anything you want while writing, like magic, nothing will be revealed. I swear.
I am also upset about work. Having mortgaged my future in all sorts of ridiculous and idealistic ways (see the LSD portion of this work) I’m now literally paying the price. Like, you know how people say: “Get your degree no matter what. The music/writing/art might not pay off.” Well, oh my god, I’m having dreams about moving to New York, thinking about joining the monastery or moving to Wyoming –for a clean start- I am literally paying the price of “following my dreams”. I have completely and utterly devastated any chance of having a job where I’m not horribly demeaned in a purely libidinal way by people who probably were not born into a much higher society than me. To get kicked around by the obviously rich is one thing, by a freelance web designer is a different story. And, ‘libidinal’ is the only appropriate way I can put it. About eighty percent of the people who come into the store, are doing so in order to have some sort of aggressive simulated sexual experience, in which they are the instigator/aggressor.
So, it’s hard to get out of that frame of mind. Whatever frame of mind that is. Before I started typing this I remembered something that happened in high school. We were coming back from a cross-country meet and I had been quiet the whole trip. Then the bus broke down and our parents were called. Mine picked me up and I got in the backseat. It might have been raining, I don’t remember. Then for no reason, I started crying. I had made a point after freshman year to never cry again; and I did really well. And even after the cross-country incident I don’t think I cried again, until I did too much acid when I was 21. So that’s like, six or seven years without crying –not bad. And of course I cried, repeatedly, when Christina left me. Fortunately, I decided that she was the last woman I would ever cry over. And though I have gotten blind drunk over women at times, I have not, soberly, that I’m aware of, cried over a woman since Christina. And once while I was living with this tweaker girl, who I shall refer to only as the ‘tweaker girl’, I came home, got drunk and announced my intention to begin sobbing. That was it! I couldn’t take a minute more of this life! I’m going to do it! I swear I’m going to do it! “Go ahead.” She said. I asked her if she would judge me if I cried, and I think she said no. So, I resolved to start crying and never did. It’s unfortunate. Anyways, I cried on the way home my sophomore year, how awesome is that! It’s just like now. You really get to see that things are only going to get worse and there’s no way to stop them, you’re being punished remember? Like, I had no idea that the villain from the first Christopher Nolan Batman was the Scarecrow. Like, he scares you, get it? Like, look how terrible your life is: you work an awful, demeaning job at a drugstore with an ice cream counter, you are several thousands of dollars in debt, you live with your parents AND borrow THEIR car… by the way, you’ll never own a car –remember the drugstore?
So, does the Scarecrow offer you an “out” like the monastery or Wyoming?
I want to kill myself.
I’m not even kidding.
I have thought about it everyday since I was, like, 10. Okay, please laugh and get it out of your system. Troy wants to use the line: “I’ve failed so badly only suicide can erase the board, give me a clean slate…” Something like that, I fucked it up. Hopefully he remembers.
The last few days all I’ve thought about was, not suicide, but the way Faulkner had a little time off after his first novel went to the publishers, so he hid in a hotel and drank bottle after bottle of gin. No food! That would be cheating. And I thought about how nice that would be, just as a little challenge to myself. See if I can drink a bottle of Bushmill’s Whiskey a day, for like, four days, just to see if I can do it. The problem is that you always think about killing yourself once your debts are cleared, or at some point in which life gives you a break. But life never gives you a break in which you can kill yourself with some peace of mind. Celine would add: “Because life is too busy killing you.” I am not Celine. And Nietzsche, who I basically stole the thing about forgetting from, he always has to grab the infinite sorrow and try to flip it around. It’s a very boot camp mentality: “Thank you sir! May I have another!” Nietzsche said something like: ‘everything is an experiment, a scientist doesn’t regret a failed experiment, why should you?’ Because it’s my life! The only way you can take the ‘experiment’ advice is if you follow with liberal doses of forgetfulness.
I just don’t want my parents to find my body. Or have to pay any of my bills. I want the whole affair to be very detached for everyone, myself included. Maybe that’s what I mean by “getting a break”.
So, here’s a segment which Peter Sotos (as well as Freud) can have a field day with; MILF porn is popular, it’s visibility amplified by the film Nailin Palin. The milfs in these pornographic movies are rarely in, even their mid-forties; and a major part of the contextalization involves the son and his friend making “ghastly” porn referencing comments about each other’s, equally hot moms. It’s as if the Oedipal complex has finally met its match: sibling rivalry. Each ‘pop’, or ‘classical’ psychiatric disorder held on display as simulacrum before being hybridized into the simulacrum of pornography. Refracting mirrors scattered in the wasteland of the imagination. It’s an apt contrast to Mackenzie Phillip’s accusations of incest against her dead father. Since this review is supposed to excoriate me I have to add: I’ve seen it and some of it’s not bad. The Oprah, the pornhub; all the tacky things that are supposed to drive boredom from your mind. Neither is as boring as a book –they are sleazy. But what is ‘sleaze’ if it applies to Oprah and milf porn. I have no objective here I’m as hollow as an automaton, but not as hollow as Jean Genet, there’s a writer for you!
So, the above is an Ambien derived holdover from the previous, never to be published reviews. I don’t know how anyone can sit and write a thought provoking analysis about anything. I enjoy it, but I can’t do it. I get lost and if there’s no narrative then I literally will become sick of the whole enterprise. Maybe I can write self-reflexively, where I only analyze what I’ve already written. But how could I even start if there’s nothing yet written?
So, I don’t want my parents to find my body, or have to pay my debts. I have a very puritanical view of life. I guess if people had told me, from the beginning, that life was going to be terrible, I could have steeled myself against it. That’s why I don’t want to have kids; even before the veil was ripped from life and I witnessed its hollow fractured nature I still didn’t like it.
So, what does Voltaire say? Essentially, “Stay busy.” And I don’t so much agree, as I’ve got no other choice. You know I like David Lynch, or I’ve been heavily affected by his work. But I, in most cases, really disagree with his general point of view. I don’t mean aesthetic either, aesthetic is what I love about Lynch. I don’t like the ‘life is either tragically beautiful or tragically tragic’ mentality. Of course he employs banality for humor’s sake, which really works when you juxtapose it against those two extremes, and the mysticism integrated into the fabric of his visual/aural aesthetic is why he’s so important in our culture. But the over-riding joy/terror dichotomy is not for me. It bothers me when I experience it, but I can still talk shit when I experience it, I am too cynical. You know who leaves no room for the reader’s cynicism? Samuel Beckett… And Thomas Bernhard. You might not like it, throw it in the garbage can, say it’s not writing, not for you. But you are not cynical; it is not lying to you about how life is. What is How it Is? Something like bodies slowly moving in mud, remembering and forgetting inconsequential things (don’t sweat the small stuff… it’s all small stuff… hahaha) What a nihilistic entreaty! Yeah, Beckett doesn’t lie. Man, you don’t want to get bored, but the alternatives are unpleasant at best.
So, I ask myself why I am always so resistant to parts of movies that are irreversible and tragic, like a really irritating miscommunication. The source for this is probably Romeo and Juliet because the tragic miscommunication is so contrary to the love story. Hamlet? No one feels bad for Hamlet, they analyze his motives, but his character secretes gloom and is practically guided to his dark end from the beginning of the play.
So, when I was writing about Peter Sotos, I said his early stuff was written by, like, the angriest 16 -year old Wasp fan in the world. And I guess he’s sobered up by now, like all that rage is going to get you nowhere, and then people think you’re some kind of chump. It’s better to stay cool, like Agent Cooper… Constantly trying to divide your conscious apprehension between all sorts of flotsam and jetsam washing against the shores of our multipronged culture. Soon, by way of eastern mysticism, the multipronged and the unipronged will be indecipherable from each other. Like William Gaddis’ essay on Evil: the Greeks, the forbearers of the high culture watermark, did not concede to evil, they conceded to misfortune. As Baudrillard said in Fragments: “People confuse misfortune and Evil” Maybe the Greeks didn’t have Evil to confuse with grief. Maybe it’s like when Nadine tried to kill herself and wound up in a coma. Big Ed said: “I don’t believe in fate. You just make your bed and haveta’ lie in it.” Homespun wisdom it was like, the only way Townes could fit his pain into songs that were comfortable enough to drag down the dirty road, that is when he needed something homespun and grievous, most of the times he just laid the bare mystery down with the right lyric to linger, punctured in your head for days… see waiting around to die it’s kind of both: Faulkner sired Townes and violence punctuated with the true silence of oncoming oblivion; if and when you keep cool and detached, like agent cooper, then deliver lines like: “I bought some wine and jumped a train, it’s just easier than just waitin’ around to die.”
Even as my senses slip out from under my fingers by writing as well as I do. I’ve been wracking my brain to write a song called I’m not afraid to die and go to hell, I love the title but I falter with the lyrics because I can’t freeze frame my moments in hell and carry them around like some kind of accomplishment. If I could only set up a movie set at a cash register. Then after, like, nine years the cashier can get on the P.A. when he has a really long line and say: “Hey, I get it… This isn’t fun. I don’t want to do it anymore. It’s not fun.” Would the Scarecrow be ill equipped to deal with this? Would he send the guy to a career counselor for losers in their 30’s who will tell him that he’s absolutely fucked and needs to get used to abject and terminal poverty because those things are his eternity.
Of course there will be some good music and books for a while before you die. If you want to feel distant and sophisticated read some Genet, he’s an automaton. After reading Jenet you ask yourself: “who watches out for this guy, makes sure his shoes are tied etc?”
If you want to read some books that compliment poverty there’s Dostoevsky, Faulkner, and O’Brien.
If you want to read some books that compliment spiritual poverty there’s Jean Amery, Emil Cioran, and Samuel Beckett
Nietzsche fits, and does not fit in both categories.
I get it, I have no more ideas, this isn’t fun anymore. Oh sure some books and music compliment this grievous situation. Just remember that all that art, books and music you have enjoyed over all these years, that made life almost seem like it had a point, was in fact constructed in defiance of life’s miseries. Almost like an artistic ‘operation’ to remove the misery that has infected the tree of life. Unfortunately, music etc. ultimately fails (see Mr. Holland’s Opus). That’s because misery hasn’t infected the tree of life. There are no trees here! Here is misery, just sitting, waiting for the end cue. On the plus side: It is pretty cool to come to the conclusion that life is so awful that no amount of joy can blot out the terrible experience. Idealistic people hate this type of analysis but they eventually get disillusioned. That’s basically because life just sucks.
Tags: Movies, Saved Admission
WHAT TO DO NOW?