Monday, May 31, 2004

A Meanness in this World



Then this morning, I wake to find a naked Liz Phair sitting on the living room floor, playing my Xbox. At first I think that’s pretty cool, but then it occurs to me that the “H.W.C.” in her hair doesn’t look so hot any more. In fact, it seems to be forming a light crust, not unlike dried cake frosting, & it kinda stinks in a not particularly fresh, rancid sorta way.

And then I realize that I didn’t fuck Liz Phair last night, that in fact, I’ve never met her, & that she could very well be leaving a serious skid mark on the carpet. (Given her disregard for the hygiene of hair, I can only imagine what state her ass is in.) And come to think of it, I don’t own
an Xbox, so where did this one come from? This mystery is getting more mysterious by the minute!

I’m about to demand an explanation, but Liz apparently just lost her last man in Super Mario Kart, because now she looks up. She has to tilt her head pretty far back to get a look at me through her artfully tousled hair. I’m not sure if her gaze is supposed to be solicitous, but I am surprised to find that it’s neither blank nor wholly intelligent. There’s some kind of idiot glint there—a consciousness that I’d hesitate to label as animal cunning. Maybe it’s sorta insectival, though I hate to do my simple nerve-stem bearin’ brothers & sisters a potential disservice through this comparison.

Let’s face it: I have no standard of comparison for what I see fermenting in Liz’s eyes. In all of my experiences, I’ve encountered nothing like it. Not even at the movies. It’s not an absence. It’s not even an absolute darkness. It’s not exactly feral or dead. It’s alien, but not in any imaginable extraterrestrial way. It’s almost Lovecraftian in its blasphemous suggestiveness of things outside normal human concepts of morality, physics, biology or mass marketing. In it, I recognized that which we all know in some primitive part of our minds, but strive never to recognize.

And my mind gives.

I don’t pass out or have a seizure. I don’t recall screaming or running. I seem to encounter an area of Hot White Oblivion. Under the circumstances, it is a blessing.

When next I become aware of my surroundings, it is as though Liz was never there. The Xbox is gone. The air is no longer redolent of sour butter. The floor is dusty, but, thankfully, unstained. And yet, I know it was no dream…

I have been given a glimpse of what is to come if humankind continues to explore the shrieking, nighted gulfs of its ignorance. I write this warning down because I hope, with little conviction, that my voice might help persuade society to renounce its quest for ever-greater control of the universe. Already, the phone rings, (Hang on a second... I don’t own a phone either! Just what the fuck is going on here?) & I can hear the buzzing voice of a telemarketer on my answering machine. It is already too late, I know, but desperately, I carry on. I can only hope that you who read this will turn back from the precipice as well…

No word from anyone, except for Laura… & M! See? And I thought no one cared! But around 7 p.m. or so, the phone rings, Actually, it’d been ringing all day, but the caller never left a message. Finally I star-69ed it. It was a 708 number that I tried to look up online. No listing. It was almost certainly M. So at 7, he does leave a message.

He’s mumbling in a secretive tone that would be comical if it wasn’t bringing out all this oiliness in his voice. He sez he’s going to be taking me up on the “favor” we spoke about. (That I be his cover story while he’s out boinking other women. After contacting me for the first time in, like, 6 months a while back, he’d sprung this on me with no warning whatsoever. I’d been so fundamentally caught off guard that I’d stupidly said OK, though I knew I wanted no part of it.) He finishes off his message with, “We should really go get a drink ‘some time soon.’”

My revulsion is great. So’s my anger. It’s all so sleazy—toward both his family, (most importantly of course,) & to myself. How could you ask such a “favor” of someone to whom you haven’t spoken & with whom you’ve made no effort to maintain a friendship?

I guess it’s in the air, meanness of spirit. Look at the photos of those Iraqi P.O.W’s being tortured by leering American G.I’s—something that’s been haunting my waking moments ever since I saw them. It seems we are solidly inside an era of bald-faced cruelty & apathy. People wear their sadism & callousness proudly, like badges of honor. Popular entertainment venerates assholes. And I don’t mean ironically, like, say, South Park, where you're supposed to think Cartman is funny, but stupid. More along the lines of Seinfeld or Curb Your Enthusiasm: where malicious, infantile glee is celebrated as though it were a state of grace. What the fuck is wrong with Larry David anyway?

And for the record, (not that this will probably be read by anyone but me,) I don’t think I’m any better. Far too often, I have been cruel or turned a blind eye & deaf ear to the suffering of others. I do, however, think there’s a difference between acknowledging your weaknesses & wallowing in them.

Maybe this brave new world is better than that. After all, at least no one’s pretending to be good. Maybe all this effort to overcome our shabbiness is somehow detrimental. Maybe in embracing our vileness, we evolve to the next level of human society—whatever nightmare vision that might be. I’m guessing that if it goes in that direction, I won’t be around to see it anyway. I can’t say I regret that too much.

In the end, it may be my own weakness that’s bringing me discomfort. The world is what it is. Much as you might like to think otherwise, you can’t change it anymore—unless you’re really rich. (And then I suspect you wouldn’t harbor much interest in changing it.) If you’re consuming air & water, creating massive amounts of waste, feeding corporate greed at the expense of lives, then you’re part of the problem, which, I guess, means that I & everyone I know are some of the bad guys.

If you do still regret your complicity, lemme tell ya, you’re a thing of the past, like the blues or cassettes or roller skates. You’re a ghost, a fossil, a tar-pit dinosaur. You’re already dead.

And now Steve Forceman must be off. ‘Cause I make you laugh, & you make me cry. So I believe it’s time for me to fly...

Saturday, May 29, 2004

Like It Matters

Something is happening to my brain. (Or has it already happened?) I'm out of control. My emotions are volatile. I can't sleep for very long, though the good news is that I don't feel very tired really. (And no, Linda, or any of you other psychotherapisser-vampiric-assholes, lemme just paraphrase the not-so-great David Bowie here: May all your vilest nightmares consume your shrunken heads etc., I don't think I'm freakin' manic.)

I get angry alla time, but almost immediately, I swing back to humor and noisy enthusiasm. I can't sit still. I pace constantly, kick my legs and grind my teeth. I feel like I'm on methamphetamine. (So I guess I should be grateful! Whatta rush!) I can't focus on one thought or activity for very long. It's hard for me to fuckin' finish anything. I can't stick to a plan. When I'm supposed to be writing or reading or whatever, I'm figuring out how to convert AAC to MP3, posting @ Zoetrope, or downloading and configuring Mozilla (including the Herculean task of importing and organizing all the cock-knocking bookmarks).

My reading habits have become similarly erratic: In addition to Infinite Jest, which I'm 'posed to be reading, I'm in the middle of both Lester Bangs books again. For, uh, "bathroom reading," I'm stuck in the middle of Chapter 2 of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and I just took Affliction offa shelf 'cause I needed a good laugh and so went straight to that truly hilarious routine about men beatin' their kids in the Teutonic Village of the soul, (or whatever,) and how it all comes down through the generations like some sorta biological predisposition to illness-- like a... well... hmmm... Really need a simile here... What's a good word? Like. A. Congenital Earache!!! Yeah! That's perfect! (Or you could just go with, "It's like an affliction." I guess.)

Anyhoo, I'm happy to say that Russ delivered the laughs, though I must admit that my memory of this passage was even funnier. But see, I had this idea-- probably from alla the Lester Bangs-- that I should write an essay about how
Affliction is, like, the worst book ever. And though you sorta have to respect that in an Ed Wood kinda way, (while acknowledging that there really are many books that are worse,) I'm also disgusted with the way in which ol' Russ passes himself off as a "literary" author, when the truth is that what he's peddling here is a cornpone Yankee-toughguy-cop thriller with some clumsy, pretentious sociological and self-reflexive musings thrown in to make it all seem like art. Gimme a fuckin' break, Russ! Why dontcha just write a dimwitted New England version of Walker: Texas Ranger for TV or some shit? Your dalliances with Hollywood seem to've rotted your brain. (Not to mention what they've done to your integrity.)

I mean, I know you've always been an overrated hack with a serious strain of narcissism that runs through your work like urine in a public swimming pool. (Wo! If I fixed the meter, that could be, like, a haiku! Rad!) Sorta like that presumably autobiographical tale about the chubby-chaser in Success Stories, in which you wax rhapsodic about your own body for fuck's sake!

I've seen you run your humble-craftsman-niceguy con in person, back in Ann Arbor, when I was but a timid writing student in '89 or '90. (Can't remember which one.) I swallowed it then-- hook, line and shrinker, as Zappa sez-- or maybe you've since become more cynical. One thing's for sure: if we were to graph the literary growth you've displayed between, say, Continental Drift and Affliction, it'd look pretty much like a straight line. Which means, humble craftsman schtick aside, that I don't think you've challenged yourself much. And niceguy or not, you ain't no Dostoevsky, lemme tell ya.

And who am I to make that judgment? Touche. A fine point. After all, Russ is published and agented and optioned and so on, and I'm not. I won't quibble with that glaringly obvious truth. ('Cause that's not an arbitrary standard, is it? Checked the bookshelves or lit. 'zines lately? Whoever's supposed to be separating the chaff from the wheat seems to've fallen asleep at the switch. Or some such mixed metaphor.)

Still, I don't think this is just sour grapes here. I think it's genuine esthetic disdain. Not in the least, because just as the Chicago Cubs recent efforts have suggested about them, I don't think Russ is trying real hard. I think he's laughing all the way to the Bank. But I could be wrong about the sour grapes. (As wasting so much time thinking about a yahoo like Russell Banks might suggest.) Can you trust your perspective in matters like this? You could've crossed over into Rashomon territory without even realizing it.

I know for a fact that I am much crueler as an appreciator of creative efforts than I am as an artistic peer. (Not, of course, that I'm anywhere near Russ's vaunted plateau.) I mean, I think I'm a good and encouraging friend to the other artists I know. But I think we should expect more from someone who the NY Times is always (patronizingly) lauding as the Great White Trash Scribe. ("Isn't it fascinating that he's able to string words together like that, in spite of his lack of breeding? Of course it's probably just onomatopoetical, sorta like a trained parrot.")

Anyhoo, Happy Memorial Day weekend, me-- and anyone else! (Like anyone else even reads this stuff.) Steve Forceman's outta here like Vladimir. (The Impaler, that is.)

Monday, May 24, 2004

this is an audio post - click to play

Friday, May 21, 2004

"This City Is Afraid of Me. I Have Seen Its True Face."




Couldn't sleep last night. Bad stomach. Wicked thunder storm. Existential angst.

When life hands you lemons, though, you pop in a tape of Puppet Master: The Legacy, break out your flamenco guitar and, for the 547th time, try to perfect your execution of the finger picking on Cat Power's "Baby Doll." At least, you do if you're Steve Forceman, PI.

(I know what you're thinking, Sloth. Cat Power? Well, Steve Forceman, PI is tough, not callous. There's not just a difference there; there's a roaring, windswept gulf. Besides, there was a fridge fulla beer, but Steve Forceman's stomach wasn't having it. I sucked up that eighth beer, in spite of acridness in my throat and an insistent gag reflex, and I played away with pride. F#, modified Bm chord/ F#, open A, B/ F# modified Bm chord. And so on.)

(What's that, Sloth? The flamenco guitar seems a little suspect. Well, I might point out that Chan is clearly Tapping OUT the beat on her guitar, flamenco style, at the beginning of "Baby Doll." And a man of action like Steve Forceman, PI always uses the instrument that is most appropriate to the job.)

Now about that Puppet Master: You've heard of a clip episode, right? Well, this was a clip-freakin'-MOVIE! And of course, I hadn't even SEEN a prior entry of the Puppet Master series in its entirety-- only the bits & pieces I positively could not otherwise avoid. I'd only rented this one on random impulse. Sort of. Actually, my cat thinks the Puppet Master films are terrifying, but I think the catnip has addled her brain.

Anyway, the only new stuff-- which was also the only stuff that made any sense whatsoever-- was about 10 minutes of "framing" footage, in which some leather clad cupcake tried to extract the secret of Toulon's puppet-animatin' magic from some b-movie Topol clone by threating him with a little, tiny pistol. The only good violence here was this part where she shoots him in the foot, and that was over in, like, 2 seconds. But she was easy on the eyes in her form fitting black espionage jammies. I looked her up on IMDB. Her only other credit was in a late period Buffy, in which she was flirting with Xander or some shit.

(Now if Steve Forceman had been trying to get the same info out of this withered old hack, he woulda done something REALLY sadistic, like make him WATCH a late period Buffy episode in its entirety-- Geneva code be damned!)

The verdict: two enthusiastic thumbs up... my ass. I fell asleep in front of an infomercial hosted by twin dwarves in suits. Really. They were pulling some sorta Carlton Sheets schtick about buying property with nothing down. All of the testimonials were provided by persons of a subtly bizarre appearance. (Can something BE subtly bizarre, Steve Forceman wonders?) Like, this one guy who had a clearly fake little, almost Hitler mustache glued to his face.

So Steve Forceman is signing off. I wish something would happen. All this sitting around wears on a man...