Full Frontal Stupidity

Speaking of saving things, (cf. that Aileen business below,) I almost lost my laptop on Wednesday. It was really fucking nice out. Being as the long Norse-mythology-type winter is about to descend on Chicago for like the next 6 months, (or maybe not, because it's usually in full swing by, like, Sept. 15. Global warming?) I figured I'd take ye Olde Laptope out and do some writing. So on my way to Grant Park, very suddenly, a freakin' wave of black clouds rolls in.

Immediately, a rainstorm of biblical proportions began. (Probably drawn by the comments I often make re: the suckiness of S. Kubrick's ouevre.) Idiot that I am, I have no waterproof case for my laptop. So I ran into Harold Washington. The library, I mean, not the guy. That woulda been pretty fucked up.

I mean, the dude's been dead for, like, over 18 years. He'd be, like, "Hi, I'm Harold Wash- ington. I was Chicago's first black mayor." And I'd be all like, "Yeeaaagh!!!" 'cuz, like, he'd be all rotted.

And he'd lay his scantily fleshed fingers on my shoulders--exposed bone clutching living, beautiful, living tissue.


(And I know where you think this is going. A beloved female acquaintance sez I can't relate an anecdote without, uh, inserting sodomy into it. Apparently she missed my recent consideration of Jeff Foxworthy's Celebrity Roast, which stuck strictly to cannibalism, but you'll see--no sodomy occurred here.)


And still clutching my living tissue and all that, Harold Washington would be like, "Lemme buy you lunch. I'm Harold Washington, (who as stated previously, is/was/whatever, Chicago's first black mayor,) and I am lonely.

"And more than that, I am hungry. But we gotta find mushy, sticky food 'cuz my esophageal region is pretty fucked up, and food might not make it to my gas-bloated belly. (Just what state of decay am I in after 18 years anyway? I mean, how fucked up are my internal organs, etc.?)

"So c'mon, dude, let's eat. I just smoked a bowl w/ the crumbling shade of Jimmy Stewart. Boy, does that guy know how to party! Who knew? He can get ya dead hookers, and all types of drugs, and unregistered firearms, which, while they won't kill yr. dead enemies, can fuck with their structural integrity.

"Wo, dude! I said 'structural integrity!' Isn't that cool? They're always talking about 'structural integrity' in TV shows, like Star Trek. I think they mentioned it a lot there--and on other sci-fi shows that are mostly inferior to Trek.

"I love Star Trek, dude, though, (and I know every Trek fan sez this, but I really mean it,) I don't go so far w/ it as to become a trekkie. They're pretty fucked up, dude, trekkies.

"What I really love best-- 'tho I'm fond of the women's short uniforms, of course-- hubba hubba--and high-tek action--are the characters. Esp. Spock and Bones. They were sorta like David and Maddie. (Though I fuckin' hated Moonlighting, dude and would love to haunt the shit out of both Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd.)


[Ha! See, you thought there was gonna be sodomy there, didn't you? With all that Bones and Spock/ David and Maddie stuff? Feel pretty stupid, dontcha?]


"But first I'd have to get a Class A Fearful Revanant rating added to my Walking Dead License. Right now, I do have a Class D Portentious Phantom thingy to go w/ my Class C Standard Zombie rating, but, you know, it's good to be versatile in this ever-changing job market. Did you know that 80% of cadavers will change jobs five times before their structural integrity fails (Wo, dude! I said it again! Isn't that cool?) and they crumble into a pile of dessicated bones? Whatta bummer, dude.

"Except for vampires--like Christopher Lee, who has everyone fooled into thinking he's still alive, but he really is a vamp since some pissed off vamps came and vamped him. The reason they were pissed, these real vamps, (dude, I mean, the other vamps, not Christopher Lee, who is also a real vamp, but wasn't yet at that point. Am I, like, making sense?) Oh yeah-- the reason these real vamps were pissed... (Do you think real vamps piss blood, I mean from all that blood they drink? Dude, that is so sick! I should ask one of 'em.)
"Oh yeah... well these real vamps, (not including Christopher Lee, who wasn't a real vamp yet. Did I already say that?) These real vamps were pissed about the way that Chris, in those old Hammer movies, (man, those things are so cheesy, but you know, kinda cool,) was trivializing vamps in the eyes of the living and thereby setting the cause of Undead rights back, like, 50 years.

"And, dude? I think that's being a little extreme. A movie, however offensive, can't do that. But, like, oh yeah, the reason I brought up vamps, dude? Was because they can repeatedly crumble and reassemble themselves, which has up- and downsides, actually. (Like reassembling yourself after a really lame party's started where you were disassembled before, and so like then being stuck at this fucking lame party, because you don't wanna be rude and leave right away.)


"And I'd really like to see Spock shove his enor- mous green- headed organ up Bones's puckered asshole. Not that I'm gay or anything. I'm just, you know, curious."



Ah fuck! There was sodomy right at the end there. I forgot he said that till now.

Anyway, I was just glad the fucker shut up. I kept hoping that maybe his rotted jaw would fall off his head from all that wagging. I hate dealing with people who are high when I'm not.

But so I turned down his offer of lunch-- even tho it woulda been free, and even though he was coming on all pathetic, trying to win my sympathy with all that shit about being lonely. Yep. I turned him down, 'cuz as you can see, he isn't just dead and gross and all that, he's fuckin' boring.





Still working on that Thing-Fish (and Hawaii) thing. Really. And it's damned interesting and incisive. I promise. But my analysis has now topped (wow I even worked sodomy into that) 50 pp. (huhuhuh "pp") and needs to be cut down and clarified a little. I gotta learn to quit digressing so much.

Ah well...

"The goddam movies. They can ruin you. I'm not kidding."

Holden Caulfield said that. He was right.

I officially hate the movies. Mostly.


Viewing a contemporary Hollywood film is like being bludgeoned repeatedly with a lit signal flare. (Aside from the horrible physical pain I mean.) Sure, there are pretty tracers and blobs of light, but when you stop to consider them, they’ve already disappeared. They have little real, lasting significance. They're just stupefying, ephemeral flashes.

The only reason you don’t notice their lack of meaning within this onslaught is because they're so damn noisy and disorienting. (Ever have that problem where you have to keep turning the movie up to hear what the fuck people are saying, only to be deafened when the music or the car chases or whatever shoots up to a deafening level, causing you to dive for the remote in a desperate attempt to save your hearing?) You’re too busy being jerked around from one shallow bang, be it physical or emotional, to the next.
I hate the movies. I'm not kidding. I am never going to see a movie again unless it's a low budget B movie, (including, but not limited to low budget 50s sci-fi, Western, noir, teen exploitation, etc. movies; kung fu movies; splatter movies; Italian zombie movies; soft core Euro trash porn; LSD inspired movies; biker movies; Bollywood musicals; Mexican wrestling movies; Brazilian horror movies; early Peter Jackson movies; (from before he turned into a Hollywood shill;) etc.

What I'm really holding out for is a super hero team up movie featuring El Santo, Coffin Joe, Emmanuel, Blacula, the fat giggling sheriff from 1000 Maniacs, Ralphus and the sadistic dentist from Bloodsucking Freaks, Coffee, that kid who can't stop playing the piano from Reefer Madness, the flying head from Zombie 3, that tough biker chick from Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill! the rabbit from Meet the Feebles, the Rod Serling narrator-type guy from Maniac, the Doctor from Faces of Death, the master of the Flying Guillotine, as well as his henchman who has to have flute music playing to do his kung fu, the Great Kriswell, that poor slob from Detour, (have no idea what he could contribute to the proceedings besides downright tragic bad luck, but what the hell, let's give the poor fuck something,) the insane knife-wielding Catherine Deneuve found in Repulsion, the doctor from Shock Corridor who says, "It's a tragedy—an insane mute will win the Pulitzer Prize," and many, many others.

That's a lot of team members, I know, but look at DCs Justice League comic books of the 1970s or the more recent "Crisis of Infinite Earths" series. They had approximately 5017 characters, and they made it work somehow.

I will watch some art house movies. (Though there are plenty of shitty movies to be found here too.) Sorry if watching those things is snobbish. Remember, I did go to film school, which probably polluted my mind. Besides, think of the existential angst the pastor from Winter Light could contribute to our super hero team. He could, like, depress his enemies into submission. (At least I'm sparing us from experimental film, which I got shoved down my throat whilst in school, and which, aside from a few exceptions, I kinda hate.)

Hollywood movies of the 1910s-70s—and a few from the 80s-2000s are OK—many of them—films by Ford, Scorsese, Sturges, Wilder, Ray, for example, are great. (If you haven't seen it, run, don't walk to your local video store and rent In a Lonely Place with Humphrey Bogart. Tell me it doesn't kick ass. If your local video store carries it.) Or a lot (but not all) of the independent films of ca. 1980-1995. (When Quentin Tarantino started to ruin the whole thing.)

But no fucking contemporary Hollywood movies. In fact no fucking Hollywood movies after maybe Unforgiven or something like that. (There are other good movies from around then, but that's just the first decent one that popped into my head.) Some animated films are still good, but not anything featuring CGI stuff. And to be fair, I never want to see my own student films ever again, because they suck, except for my animated stuff, which is only OK at best.

Oh yeah, and while we're on the subject of films that suck, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say something that would doubtlessly piss a lot of people off. (Fortunately, they'll never read my blog, so I don't have to worry about them.) Stanley Kubrick had no clothes! I mean, like the Emperor didn't. His movies are not these deep philosophical "experiences." They're just muddled, bloated crap. Even when I'm high, they still bore me, unlike The Wall, which remains the unintentionally hilarious masterpiece it always was.

Oh yeah—and this is probably another symptom of film school poisoning—there are some great documentaries. (Though again, there are many, many that suck.) Generally, I think it's an underrated format.


Speaking of documentaries, does gnomish filmmaker Nick Broomfield ever get laid? And if so, who the hell sleeps with him? These and other ponderables maintained my interest through the awkwardly constructed opening moments of Broomfield’s schlockumentary Aileen, which I just watched. So much so that by the time the movie really got going, I was engaged in this film about the last days of a mass murderer Aileen Wournos in a way that went beyond the predictably necrophiliac.

This movie had a feeling of depth that was unprecedented by anything else I’ve seen from ol’ Slick Nick. It’s just as impressionistic and sketchy as all his other shit. (Kurt and Courtney; Biggie and Tupac.) But in the end, it finds some sort of humanity in Wournos, and in the process makes a virtually unspoken but eloquent argument against the death penalty.

That it does so without whitewashing Wournos, without ever trying to make the viewer forget what she has done and is probably still capable of doing, is no small feat. It’s easy to win compassion for victims, saints and puppy dogs, but what about “monsters?” (Incidentally, as much as I admired Monster, Aileen also bore out the fact that the other film rendering the characters and the world they inhabit a little too pretty and comprehensible.) Once you paint someone as “evil,” you’ve excused society (and yourself) from taking any responsibility for her.

Broomfield's still crass and awkward here— just as he was in his earlier taken on this subject, Aileen Wournos: The Selling of a Serial Killer. Still, here, he refuses to use that whole "evil" oversimplification. He also refuses to titillate or add forensic fuel to an already well-fed fire. He just asks why and how, while acknowledging that there aren't really any good answers. And ultimately, he advocates for compassion, even trying, I think, to save Wournos’s life. That he’s only able to do so by making a film is a poignant absurdity that he ruefully acknowledges.

Wournos, at least, who had been around the block more than once with filmmakers and journalists, seems to genuinely appreciate his efforts to communicate with her. Overall, the movie did a fine job of demonstrating the consequences of failure: Broomfield's, Wournos's, and (gulp, sorry, gotta say it,) that of the society that spawned her. Everyone failed to save her or her victims.

The movie was definitely a big downer, but I liked it.

You Just Might Be a Macrocosmos

I'm sorry. I wasn't gonna present another installment of this blog till I had my Thing-Fish (and Hawaii) musings in better order. At least, till I had my account of the first day w/ both Thing-Fish and Hawaii together. It's coming along. I have all the material, but it's like 30+pp. long. It needs some editing, and I'm working at that at a daemonic clip. The bad news is, this is taking me longer than I'd hoped. The good news is that I oughta be able to squeeze at least a few entries out of this bloated meta-entry. And in pretty quick succession...

In the meantime, though, something came up, and I feel I must get it down here. It's just too fucking important to let it go for another moment...




I was trying to find South Park on Comedy Central, which was supposed to be on, but apparently they'd decided to go w/ The Jeff Foxworthy Celebrity Roast. I didn't think they did these celebrity roast things anymore--except for maybe in some really obscure, idyllic corners of the world, like maybe on an island in the South Pacific, where the old ways are still maintained. These shows used to be all over the place when I was a very little kid. But now, I absolutely could not remember what happened during them. I decided I'd better watch this one and find out.

Whilst I was sitting through the 57 or 58 advertisements that Comedy Central likes to air between any 2 programs, (I think--the only show I ever watch on the network is South Park,) I was positively reeling at the implications of the program's title. There seemed to be at least 2 ways you could interpret it. Like, was Jeff Foxworthy going to roast some celebrities? That'd be pretty cool--but how cool would depend on which celebrities had been selected for roasting. It's really pretty rare that I care about a celeb. one way or another, but if say Johnny Depp, who I kinda like, (in a limited sorta way,) was on the list, I'd be a little bummed out. On the other hand, watching the fat drip and crackle from the bones of Jimmy Fallon, well that'd be sort of all right.

I mean, really, whatever celebrities were involved, I figured it would be pretty cool. It was a sound idea for a TV program. I'd watch it.

But the there's another possible interpretation of this show's title: a bunch of celebrities roast Jeff Foxworthy. Well, now this is a pretty good idea too--though more limited. The good news is it'd have to be a one-off and so wouldn't have much chance to get penned in by its limitations--barring, of course, some unholy display of godlike power and/or of really advanced science. (Whozat said magic would be almost indistinguishable from really advanced science to a relatively primitive mind? Rousseau? Barbara Bush?)

See, Jeff Foxworthy can only be roasted once. I mean, you could warm up leftovers or smoke or pickle some of him, (maybe to munch on while you watch future episodes of the show,) or use less readily digestible chunks of his remains as a base for stew or a nice soup (tomato-miso maybe???) But while that would be awfully special, I think the show would start to lose some of its immediacy after a while. (I mean, what are we making here, a cooking show? And if that's the case, shouldn't we maybe set up shop across the street at the studios of the Food Channel?)

They could probably pull this of for a little while, if they got some really good celebrity hosts, I wouldn't mind seeing Herve Villechaize and the midget from Freaks team up for one week's outing. (That dwarf from Bloodsucking Freaks would just be too obvious and redundant.) But the problem there is that they're both dead. And like if we're gonna ressurect anyone here, it should probably be Jeff Foxworthy, unfortunately, so that we can then kill and eat him again. But now this is getting offensive, because I'm exploiting dwarfishness and midgetry(???) not to mention native speakers of both French (Villechaize) and German (midget from Freaks). Still, that's better than having really boring celebrity pairings, like maybe a "Must-see-TV" nostalgia thing with John Mahoney and Helen Hunt. (P.S. Tony Shaloub, please go away...)

But, no holds barred, here's my last take on that title: Jeff Foxworthy and a group of celebrity guests roast each other at the same time!!! Again, you could only, physically squeeze so many episodes out of that premise. (Unless you were gonna go on w/o Jeff Foxworthy in future epi's, making it more like The Jeff Foxworthy Memorial Celebrity Roast. But let's face it, title aside, that would get about as absurd as post-Duchovny X-Files.)

Still, just imagine the really "Must-see" experiences you'd have here: all yr. old friends, like Sting, Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan, (united in this death orgy, as they were in movies,) Robert DeNiro, J Lo, (better get an Xtra large spit for that famous "big ass,") Catherine Zeta-Jones, Ben Stiller, lined up--hooves tied, apples browning in their mouths, as they're slowly turned, (growing ever more succulent,) on sticks that've been gently rammed up their asses --and far enough to bear their weight, which, I reckon, must be pretty damn far. Just the thought of it warms my heart. All the gifts they've given us, and now this final gift...

Or how about Nicholas Cage's semi-burnt body, impaled on its long wooden spit, reaching out to turn Jeff Foxworthy's equally-spitted carcass, whilst Jeff Foxworthy simultaneously turns Nicholas Cage's semi-burnt body. There goes Jeff! There goes Nick! There goes Jeff! There goes Nick! There's yr. circular ecosystem.

And how about the ultimate roast--nie on cosmic in its symbolic implications? Jeff Foxworthy gradually roasts his own body, turning it round and round like the earth itself, meanwhile scarfing the cooked pieces of his own self? Who needs other celebrities?!!!

In this way, Jeff becomes our very own Midgard Serpent, wrapped around the earth (which itself is round and turning,) ever twisting, biting his own tail, ever consuming and restoring himself. Ever creating, ever destroying... The Great Cycle of Life....




And here's The Great Letdown: all that happened on The Jeff Foxworthy Celebrity Roast was that Jeff Foxworthy and a bunch of other guys who called themselves "rednecks" sat around and teased each other in a giggly, cutesy-pie way. It was sorta like being a fly on the wall of yr. high school girls' locker room--except they were guys with stupid facial hair. Ah well, better luck next time...

Titus Strikes Back

Now how the fuck did he know I had a blog?



Had a long night. I wake up this morning and walk around in a daze, wishing like shit that I had a cup of coffee, but too fried to even contemplate making coffee or walking over to the local coffee merchant. And then I see it.

At first, it looks just like a spot of sunlight, right in front of the door, but I know that can't be right, because the door's too far away from the window to be getting any direct sunlight. Besides, there's something wrong with the color. It was too white.

It was an envelope. Apparently, someone had slid it under the door--someone real classy, given the loop of red ribbon (lined with gold colored thread) tied around its unmarked surface.

Like any no-nonsense private eye, Steve Forceman has a lot of enemies. And some of them are clever enough to have, oh, maybe laced an envelope with some deadly biological or chemical agent. So you'll understand if the first thing I did was to don a pair of latex gloves and give the thing a look.

Now I couldn't have a full toxicological screen run on the thing, as I'd pissed off my contact at the FBI. (The regular cops had hated me for a long time already.) We were drunk one night, and I told him he looked like Cher. And he said, like Cher when she was on Sonny & Cher? And I said, no, more like she looked in Silkwood. And he got mad and said to go fuck myself. With relish. And I was gonna ask him where he got that 'with relish' part, because it seemed pretty clever at the time. (It seems pretty dumb now.)

But instead I started to tell him about this secret fantasy I'd always had about doing a three-way with Cher and Gertrude Stein, while Alice B. Toklas watched and jerked off, but he'd already left right after he'd told me to go fuck myself with relish, so instead I told my fantasy to the whole bar. Little Joe, the bartender, wanted to know whether Alice B. Toklas was using her hand to jerk off, because he sorta pictured her using a vibrator or maybe a dildo. And this burntout lady with dyed red hair at the end of the bar wanted to know what positions we'd all be in, but she must've had too much to drink, because she had to go puke before I finished my description. And this guy in a Mark Prior jersey--come to think of it, he could've been Mark Prior--he was that bland and pale and fishy--(and if it was Mark Prior, I'm really pissed that I didn't have the presence of mind to ask him for his autograph, or at least threaten to beat the shit out of him if he landed on the disabled list again anytime in the next, like, 5 years)--well, he wanted to know if maybe Sonny could get in on the action--maybe on the sidelines with Alice B. Toklas or something. And I said that was a stupid idea.

And this old guy, who actually seemed to've waxed his mustache like they used to in the old days, wanted to know if Gertrude Stein would be saying, Don't, pussy. Don't. Don't, please don't. I'll do anything, pussy, but please don't do it. Please don't. Please don't pussy... as Ernest Hemingway claimed he heard her 'pleading and begging' under (presumably) similar circumstances in A Moveable Feast. And if so, this guy wanted to know, whom would she be addressing? Me, Cher, or Alice B. Toklas? And would the stresses fall on 'please' or 'don't' or 'pussy' or what?

And someone else wanted to know who Gertrude Stein was, and when I scornfully replied, You don't know who arguably the greatest voice of modernism in 20th century English literature is, you little piece of shit? he tried to save face by saying that he might not know who Gertrude Stein was, but he sure as shit knew who Alice B. Toklas was. And I said, gimme a break. (I sure do need one). How the fuck can you know who Alice B. Toklas is if you don't know who Gertrude Stein is? Otherwise Alice B. Toklas is, at best, a literary footnote.

And then he really threw me and said that Alice B. Toklas was the main character in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which was his favorite book. As everyone knows, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was written by Gertrude Stein for Chrissake!!!! So I asked him who wrote the goddamned book, since it was his favorite and all. And he said that the copy his beloved Czech grandmother gave him on her bedbug be-ridden deathbed, was missing its cover and frontispiece, and he'd always wondered who'd written the thing, but had never checked, because he wanted to remember the book exactly as his grandmother had given it to him, which meant that, among other things, he must never know who wrote the book, and that I had now ruined it for him.

I was going to mention that avoiding knowledge of the authorial identity of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas seemed like a peculiarly idiosyncratic way to maintain his memory of the book's original condition, since how did the absence of a page and a cover--that is strictly physical details, which could easily be preserved otherwise--necessitate this ignorance?

That bit of incisive thinking probably would've really pissed him off, because it might be construed as insensitive, but he was already taking a swing at me, so I didn't have time to utter a single word. Instead, I ducked beneath his out-flung arm. (His aim was bad due to his state of inebriation.) And I grabbed a bottle and tried to break it across the bar, like they do in the movies, and then I'd slash at him and stuff like that--not really hurt him, as I didn't want any long term jail time, but, you know, just kind of keep him at bay--maybe even scare him off. But after the second try, the bottle still hadn't broken (which seemed pretty unlikely). Fortunately he passed out at exactly that moment--probably due to the sudden exertion of taking a swing at me after god knows how many hours of sessile boozing.

And Little Joe the bartender told me I'd have to leave because I was too drunk and rowdy. And while he led me to the door, I saw that the woman at the end of the bar had returned from the lavatory and that her hair wasn't dyed--it was a wig. Anyway, I asked her if she'd like to fuck. And she called me an asshole, and she was probably right. I'm not sure.

But so, I couldn't get the tox screen. So I was just gonna try to eyeball the envelope--you know, look for white powder and stuff like that. And maybe give it a good sniff, but from a distance, because if it smelled like almonds, it was cyanide, and if it smelled like oranges, I was about to have a seizure. There might have been the faintest breath of cologne, but otherwise, it didn't smell much at all. So I opened it, taking similar precautions, and found nothing that appeared to be dangerous. Only a crisply folded piece of plain white paper, that, when unfolded bore a bold, flowing script.

In black ink it was, and judging from its layout, it was a poem. Its title was: "So you want a sonnet? Then I will give you a sonnet!" Beneath that, lay the verse itself:


The eagle suffers little birds to sing,
Thus do I bear the poop you do sling;


Poop? Who the hell wrote this thing anyway? And I'm not so sure about that meter. But it continued:


These words are razors aimed at your foul heart,
I hope they do rip and tear it apart;
My sphincter you call tight, but yours is quite loose,
For you love riding the fleshy caboose;


Now that's getting a little personal. But like, how seriously can you take this guy's writing? It didn't hurt me one bit. And notice how he avoids vulgar words, but still uses vulgar metaphors! What a hypocrite and/or prude!

And he's also a homophobe. And like, if you are going to write insensitively about acts of homoeros, at least get your imagery straight. One doesn't ride the caboose, one takes it there. I mean, in there. (Except, to be fair, now that I think about it, his modification of this popular metaphor sorta makes sense. The caboose is in the rear--of the train, I mean. So he's making it like it's in the rear of the receiving party. See?)

But so, here's more:


You find me alluring, or so you do say;
Deep is my dislike of those who are gay;


See? I told you. Homophobic asshole!


In marsh do I lurk, sometimes it is true,
But at least I have a real job, unlike you;


Ha! I knew I saw him in the mud! And I knew he thought I was some kinda bum too.


When Yuletide arrives, your spirits are cheap;
In poop may you drown, a big steamin' heap!



Well, fuck. Was that the problem? I mean, do you tip your building maintenance guy? But, OK, it's a human concern, at least--a personal pain I unintentionally inflicted on the guy. Maybe he's not such a bad building maintenance guy after all! Maybe he just needs a little love...

At least, that's what I thought till I saw the bottom of the page:


"My poetry is better than yours, poophead! And your 'blog' stinks of year old oats and beet paste! Write never of me there again, or else I will cut off all your water! Try and make a poop then! Hahaha!"


I guess I'll have to take his word on that oats and beet paste thing. (He actually wrote out "Hahaha," by the way.) Anyway, I guess I'll make sure to tip the fucker, come the holidays. But he better watch out...

Anyway, that's it till next time. It'll be about Hawaii, I hope, because otherwise, I'm gonna forget everything that happened on my trip. Hope all is well, Sloth. And anybody else who might read this...

Yours Truly, S Forceman, P.I.

Titus: A Sonnet

See, I would get back to this Hawaii thing. (I will, dammit. That is my blood vow.) However, shit keeps happening. Like first this tagging thing. (Which was cool and all, don't get me wrong. I'm honored to've been tagged.) And then...

My sink was fucked up. No hot water. And while Steve Forceman, P.I. is about as masculine as you can get without exploding into a volcano of semen, testosterone n' beer, he's not, strangely, very mechanically inclined. Well--maybe about some stuff, but not so much plumbing. (Ha ha! "Plumbing.")

So, like, I put in a call to the building management office, & yonder rides Titus, our building super. Titus is a gentlemen of Eastern European extraction--judging by his accent (and Steve Forceman's limited ability to identify it). (Or maybe he's Roman--I mean, dig that name.) A distinguished figure is he, with salt n' pepper hair, a spiffy white shirt (complete with his emblazoned name) that is never less than dazzling--like, if you look at it, you will see nought but prismatic spots for several minutes--dark, ruddy type complexion and soulful brown eyes. I'd fuck him in a NY minute. Fuck that. I'd fuck him in a NY second. Fuck that. I'd fuck him in a NY nanosecond. Fuck that... well, you get the idea.

Anyway, I get the sense that Titus doesn't like me. There's a sourness that creeps into his demeanor when he's dealing with me. And no, I'm not making this up. Nor am I paranoid. I've seen him with others, and he seems, like, substantially more congenial. My intuition is that he dislikes me because I keep odd hours. (And as ol' Steve Forceman is a P.I. who must live and die by his wits, you better believe his powers of intuition are a little more than formidable.)

I think that he thinks that that means I'm some sort of unemployed slacker sort of fellow, and that's flat out horseshit, as I work harder than whatsisface cleaning the Aegean stables. (What the hell was that guy's name anyway? And why do I have an easier time remembering the name of the Aegean stables? Hmmm...)

So he comes to my place and dismantles the whole sink, while I'm trying to type up some really riveting stuff about Hawaii that can be posted at my blog, and he just totally ruined the mood. Who'd've thought of it? TItus? Ruin the mood? I told ya already, that guy is nothing but pure eros.

But still, so he ruined the mood, and then had the audacity to bitch at me for washing coffee grounds down my garbage disposal. I mean, what the fuck's a garbage disposal for, anyway? Last time I checked, it was for the disposal of garbage. I think.

He really pissed me off, Titus.

Titus.

Titus licks his mother's pussy. Titus ricks his brother's kussy. Titus likes men in little leather panties. He likes to fondle their packages and bathe in his own sperm. Titus will eat a flower right off the end of yr. dick. And for today, at least, Titus is controlling my life.

Titus reeks of goat milk. Titus peeks at rote kilts. Titus Titus Titus. Tight ass tight ass tight ass. Titus, don't smite us! (Or bite us, for that matter.) Titus, light us a ciggy wiggy. Titus might as well go back to Serbia (or whatever fine nation he hales from). Titus should write book blurbies.

I bet Titus eats cat feces. I bet Titus bleats bat pieces. He fucks 'em and sucks 'em for fun and for sport. He chucks them and mucks them, Oh! how he cavorts!

Titus is an ancient Greek philosopher, greater than Plato or Aristotle, but this is not known, because all of his works were lost in a fire at Halicarnassus ca. 300 B.C. That's when he's not being a handyman, obviously.

Titus lurks amongst cats tails and mud, at the edge of the marsh and pond. Clutching dirt thing, Titus waits.

Titus has a head cold. And syphilis.

Titus wants to love you down. (Even if it takes all night.) Titus gwines ter shove you down. Ooohh you make him feel so tight. Titus pukes up miles of back road. Titus inhales an entire tank of oxygen in one gasp. Then he lights a cigarette and explodes. Then he eats an orange sherbet push up in the backyard of the house where I was born. Titus feels nothing but scorn. Titus has bad corns.

So you understand my dilemma.

More about Hawaii soon...

The Ripple Effect

So here are the five people I tagged (see entry Beware: It Could Happen to You! below):

Eric

Jaime Adrian

Jackson West

Lorelei

pup


Here's hoping they don't mind me linking to them. (If any of you read this and want me to unlink you, just let me know. Apologies, if necessary, in advance.)


Meanwhile, here's another image of Hawaii. That's the international observatories atop Mauna Kea. It's not a post card. Really. I was there. It was ass cold. More about it later...

Steve Forceman has left the building. Except he's still typing this shit, so he must still be here somewhere. And he's no freakin' Elvis, while we're on the subject. Which, while unfortunate in some respects, is arguably good in others--like, for instance, (but not limited to) the fact that he's not dead. (But what's fucked up either way is how he's referring to himself in the 3rd person.) Whatever. I/he am/is gone...

Beware: It Could Happen to You!

OK something came up that's immediate. It has little to do with Thing-Fish and pretty much nothing to do with my trip to Hawaii, (which I will get back to within a week or so). But I have to deal with it here.

I'm here to tell you that there is a vast, sinister internet conspiracy goin' on. It dictates that if you maintain a blog, you may be tagged. If you are, and you're willing to play, here's what you're supposed to do:

1) At your blog, present a list of ten songs that you have been diggin' lately.

2) Then tag five more people.

Thanks to Jarrod for tagging me. Following his example, I'm cheating by adding an extra song:

Where Eagles Dare - The Misfits
Mary of Silence - Mazzy Star
Cocaine Blues - Johnny Cash
Gimme a Pigfoot - Bessie Smith
A Pox on You - Silver Apples
You Crummy - Lee "Scratch" Perry
Philosophy of the World - The Shaggs
Welfare Love - Kool Keith
White Blur 2 - Aphex Twin
A Cosmic Telephone - Kali Bahlu
Louie Louie - The Stooges (Hands down, the best version
of this song ever.)

I don't know many other people who maintain a blog. So I just kind of hunted down some blogs that sounded interesting. I'm off to tag their owners now and will list them here presently.

Thanks for playing...

The Grand Scheme of Things

So there I was, Sloth: driving endlessly across the big island of Hawaii, listening to Frank Zappa’s Thing-Fish, the only CD I had.

You may ask yourself how I ended up stuck with Thing-Fish as my only travel music. The fact of the matter is, it wasn’t my only travel music. I had my iPod, complete with radio transmitter, but the Hawaiian airwaves were surprisingly populated, and the Belkin radio transmitter’s reception is a little spotty. Driving around trying to listen to the thing meant an almost constant trip around the dial, which was not only annoying but hazardous as well, as I was traveling solo, and it’s hard to drive while you’re staring at the radio.

You may ask yourself why, if I had the iPod, I’d bothered to bring a CD copy of Thing-Fish in the first place. (It wasn’t the only CD I had brought with me from Chicago. I had a 3 CD box set of very late period Gary Numan stuff, but I could not, for the life of me, work up the will to listen to. ‘Matter of fact, though emblazoned with Gary’s intense, silently imploring face, it never once made it into my rental car. And despite the fact that I pretty much always have some shit playing, the rental car was the only place where I listened to music on this trip.) The truth is, I hadn’t decided if I even wanted Thing-Fish in my iTunes library, let alone on my iPod, where space is at a premium. (I have the big one, but the fucking thing is still almost full. An armageddon of b-list music is at hand, but I’m staving it off till the last possible minute. You never know when b-list stuff might find a new connection to you and thus leap to a-status, or vise versa.) On this trip, I’d decided, Thing-Fish and I were going to have it out. One way or another, we were going to come to at least a general understanding of where we stood in relation to each other. For reasons other than limited space, I didn’t wanna let this album sit in my library, unless I was sure it belonged there. And I wasn’t.

(The Gary Numan set was there for the same purpose, though there the question of whether or not to include it in my library had more to do with the relatively simple question of had Gary Numan’s declined so much at that point that none of it was worth salvaging? Imagine slogging through 3 CDs of bad to mediocre Gary Numan, and you may understand why I stuck with the more difficult Thing-Fish problem.)

You may ask yourself why I am so ambivalent about Thing-Fish, and, life being notoriously short, why I was wasting my time thinking about it. It isn’t as though there isn’t enough other music, good and bad, to keep me occupied for several lifetimes. Well, see, the thing is, whatever else you want to say about it, Thing-Fish is a major piece of work by an important musical artist. Now, some of you may quibble with one part or the other of that statement. I know that a lot of Zappa enthusiasts don’t give much thought to Thing-Fish. They are disappointed by the way in which it casts a handful of mostly older Zappa songs into new arrangements that are then used as a backdrop for the album’s story. I have less of a problem with this, as I don’t feel that he arbitrarily threw the stuff together. I feel like he choose the material for a reason—placing it in a new context in which it could stand out in a new relationship to the narrative, which in turn is rendered more powerful thanks to the music. It’s like a bas-relief type thing.

As far as Zappa the important artist goes, well, a lotta people, both prominent and not, would beg to differ. Lester Bangs, who I greatly admire, went so far as to pretty much hate Zappa, as did, Bangs’s hero, the wise man Lou Reed. (Who, ironically, was chosen to induct Zappa into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.) I’m not gonna go into my reasons for respecting Zappa, because we’ll never get to the matters at hand, if I do. (Besides, though he’s kinda cerebral, a lot of my admiration for Zappa is intuitive, emotional, etc.) Just suffice it to say that, while he ain’t no Pablo Picasso or Miles Davis, he is, I believe important.

So on the one hand, I had problems with Thing-Fish. On the other, I recognized its potential value. And that was a pain in the ass. In fact, it was such a pain in the ass that if circumstance hadn’t pushed me to work this matter out, I might’ve just given up.

You may ask yourself just what the fuck I was doing in Hawaii in the first place, and along with that you may ask yourself the corollary question: if I was in Hawaii, why was I on the big island? At least, that’s what a lot of people have asked me since I got back. That’s unfortunate, because the big island is amazing. As long as I live, I don’t think I’ll ever forget the time I spent there. I’m told it doesn’t have the resorts that Oahu or Maui have. (In that respect, I throw people off even further when I tell them that I stayed in the Hilo area—all the way across the island from Kona, where its most prominent resorts are .) But OK, I’m not answering the question. And this one, at least, has a simple answer: I was on a job. A missing person case that got pretty messy, but professional ethics forbid from saying much about it.

A less than comprehensive list of things that I have obsessed over during the course of my life: the phrasing of the preceding clause; the ubiquitousness of Brian Dennehy in the American cinema of the 80s; the assholery of Lou Reed, Ariel Sharon, DW Griffith—arguable father of cinema or not—and (regrettably—because he helped bring ya a lot of great modern literature that might otherwise be lost in the ether, like The Wasteland and Ulysses,) Ezra Pound—I’m not gonna get into Hitler, Stalin & C., because it sorta goes without saying that they are way worse; (besides which, I think our whole culture is obsessed with them;) the writing of Thomas Pynchon, (I stole the word “assholery” from him, by the way;) Bon Jovi, bon fires, bon bons, and bon mots; the indentation at the center of a woman’s throat; Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Ford’s The Searchers, and Ray’s In a Lonely Place; (I have this whole theory that links ‘em up as each film intentionally calls into question the validity of a major cinematic icon’s shtick—Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, and Humphrey Bogart respectively;) the tragic life and death of Dana Plato; the moral problems posed by the murder of Jeffery Dahmer; (my initial response when I heard about it: “Good;” along with everyone else who knew me at the time, I was disturbed by this bit of vehemence, but it just came out of my mouth—sorta like this one time when someone asked me how I could like Burger King more than McDonalds, and I unconsciously answered, “It just tastes better” —how’s that for disturbing?) cockroaches; my inability to reconcile myself to Buddhism; (it seems very cool and all, but I have problems with that whole self negation thing;) smelly, crappy doody; smoking cigarettes; (it took me approximately 57,326 attempts before I finally quit;) the Chicago Cubs—my most unhealthy obsession; (I tell ya, any day now, I’m gonna have an aneurysm over their fumbling seemingly Keystone Kop inspired take on the game of baseball—Why do I take it seriously? Year after year, why do I care? Someone please make it stop! I’m sick sick sick sick!!!) And, as any sensitive reader of this chronicle knows, most preponderantly, prominently, eternally, longingly, George Clooney’s ass (q.v. the prior entry (The Point) of Diminishing Returns).

And more recently, Zappa’s “rock musical” Thing-Fish. I’m calling it a rock musical, not just as a means of dodging associations with that most bloated, silly artifact of the bloated, silly musical style we call “classic rock,” (another fucking stupid label, while we’re on the subject,) the “rock opera.” (I freakin’ loathe Tommy—am in fact, with a few exceptions, not particularly fond of The Who. I mean, at least The Wall is so pompous and narcissistic that it’s unintentionally funny.) See, it’s a play within a play in which a married couple attend a performance of a Broadway musical that eventually draws them in, both literally—they’re kidnapped by members of the cast—and figuratively: while maintaining their role as audience, the also enter the reality of the production they’re watching, becoming characters on more than one level. If that makes any sense. If sense can be made of Thing-Fish, perhaps it can only be sensed. (Thank you, King Missile.)

But first a glimpse into my personal history with Thing-Fish: in times of yore, when I was but a humble undergrad, I started checking out Zappa. My hometown radio was pretty meat n’ potatoes, and none of my friends or older relatives had any Zappa in their record collections that I could steal or at least listen to a whole lot. Thus I’d had little prior exposure to him, but when it comes to music, I dig around a lot, for better or worse.

(Sometimes I worry that my record collection’s going to absorb me in some Twilight Zonian way, so I’d become, like, a sentient CD or some shit Rod Serling would come up with. Serling rules! by the way. Or maybe I could be more like a sentient mp3 file—that’d be more of the moment—though I’d make it an AAC file, cuz I like Macs better. And I could be trapped in my iPod that some callous asshole like me would carry, thus enacting the sort of karmic cycle you usually find on The Twilight Zone—or in a more straightforward way, in EC comics. Or maybe I could end up like an endlessly replicating self at some music sharing site. And then, like, I could get loose all over the internet and become omnipotent and smack all of civilization ‘neath my digital heel, sorta like that guy in Lawnmower Man . Or maybe not.)

So like, there I am, hungry for more music. And I’m away from home for the first time, and I’m meeting all these people and reading all this stuff—some of it (and them) describing music I’ve never heard of or have, but only in a cursory sort of way. And pretty soon, I’m running around chasing after this motley assortment of records and CDs. And somewhere in there was Zappa.

I don’t know why I started with Joe’s Garage, his 1979 rock opera. (This time, in a tongue-in-cheek way, the term fits.) As Zappa’s music goes, it’s a bit anomalous. He rarely worked in narrative terms—frequently, he didn’t even work in traditional songs—but here you had a three-act epic, in which our dystopian society (maybe it’s in the near future, but Frank never says so,) censors all music. It is stupid. It is profound. I loved it.

And it’s way more accessible than Thing-Fish, which I chased down after finding out that it was another rock musical/opera/whatever “starring” most of the cast of Joe’s Garage. Eagerly did I throw it into my CD player. 80 or so minutes later, after I had consumed both parts of this two-disc set, I was stunned. (OK, I wasn’t nonverbal. I didn’t have a concussion or anything like that. ) And I wasn’t just put off by the way in which Thing-Fish betrayed my expectations. I was put off by it. I don’t even think I was thinking of Joe’s Garage much, if at all. I was trying to figure out what the fuck this was, with all of its stereotyping of African Americans, women and gay men, in all of its absurd and truly perverse sexual abuse—not to mention its vicious ridicule of Broadway musicals and its (?sarcastic?) paranoid references to government-engineered disease. What was Zappa saying? I mean, while not all Zappa is topical, Joe’s Garage certainly was, and with all of its arguably offensive cultural baggage, Thing-Fish had to be as well. Didn’t it? I mean, you don’t roll all of this stuff out in the service of a gag. Do you? And if you do, haven’t you maybe crossed some sort of moral line, if not, at least, the boundaries of good taste?

Welp. That’s a question we’ll have to consider in the next entry, because in the interest of updating in a more timely fashion, I’m going to do things differently. In case you haven’t noticed, I tend to write in very long chunks. What’s more, I’m pretty obsessive when it comes to editing. Taken together, all of this means that it takes me a long time to finish anything. Thus the infrequent updating.

As far as writing about the complicated and interlocking subjects of my struggles with Thing-Fish and my trip to Hawaii, it would take forever to do things this way. Fortunately, the trip, at least, can be broken into distinct pieces. Thing-Fish is another matter, but I think my ideas about it can be made to fit into a more episodic approach. So more episodic it shall be. That way, I’ll be able to update much more frequently—I hope. Maybe once a week!

(Woo hoo! I know a lot of people are able to update a couple of times a week. But if you want the highly polished product you’re used to getting from Steve Forceman, you’re just gonna have to accept this time frame. Anyway, it’ll be faster than normal, for what it’s worth.)

That’ll make for shorter entries, and it may take some things a few entries to resolve themselves, but I think it’ll work. We’ll see. Anyway, Sloth, and whoever else may be reading, I’ll be back soon. Really. With pictures too! (I'm finally figuring out the finer points of this blogging thing! See image above: of me snorkeling! I took it myself! How about that!) Seriously! Bye for now! Really! Take care! Etc. etc. etc!!!!!!!!!!

I am still a lameass...

It figures.

For several months my blog receives few hits, and my guest book is absolutely silent. Figuring no one is paying attention anyway, I become lackadaisical about updating. Then I go out of town for 2 weeks, (on a working vacation to the big island of Hawaii,) and the blog is getting hit more than it has, like, ever, and some of these kind people actually sign the guest book! Thanks, all, for visiting. Really.

About those updates: I will make them more frequently. I'll shoot for weekly, though I write very slowly in an anal, nitpicky sort of way. I really hope that at least some of you will continue to visit.

Later this week, I'll have something up about what I was doing while I was away. (What I did during summer vacation?) And about Frank Zappa's Thing Fish, which, I listened to about 5,000 times, because it was the only CD that made it to the big island with me.

This trip was marked by some really bizarre moments. Some of it was awful, but most of it was wonderful. And you were there. And you. And you. (Or whatever the hell Dorothy said after coming out of a coma, apparently suffering from a really severe sort of head trauma.) I'll also try to get back to that list of 35 things that have made my life worth living, though I worry that I'm not doing justice to most of them.

Thanks, thanks, thanks for stopping by...

A World of Good

I’ll bet you’ve all been wondering just when the hell I was going to update this thing. You’ve probably been going through withdrawal, sweating, with the shakes, pink elephants dancing in front of your eyes to demented melodies no Disney hack composer ever dreamed of.

I mean, check out that guest book. People sign it like there’s no tomorrow. Like that limey who’s not even here to look at my blog. No, he wants to tell me some shit about googlewhacks, for chrissake. I gotta google for him to whack. (Actually, I thought that was sorta cool and have a great reverence for the British people.)

As for explanations, I won’t whine about my personal life. I’ll just say one thing: I’ve been obsessing over this fucking blog entry, or rather the series of blog entries I’m about to commit to the electronic ether. I’ve been sitting around with an ever accumulating pile of sheets torn from a small army of yellow legal pads, classifying, agonizing, hewing away at things I love. All for this stupid blog.

Remember that 35 thing? You know—where I was gonna laud 35 things that have made my life worth living? Well… you’d be surprised how hard it is to narrow a list of that shit down to just 35 items. Early on, I even excluded my favorite material to jerk off to. I want to keep that special and private, because photographic images from my own colonoscopy, for example, have great spiritual significance to me, and it would cheapen them and render them less arousing to describe them.

So I limited myself to material drawn from various creative media, since, as you’ve probably figured out if you’ve read very much of this blog, I waste a lotta time on print, music, film, and the visual arts.

Even within this very limited set of categories, they are not my 35 favorite items, and they will not be presented in any significant order. If I’d tried to approach my material this way, I’d still be writing on Judgment Day—completely oblivious to a simultaneous Ragnarok, Armageddon. Mass Ascension on Divine Spaceships and a Cubs World Series victory or what ever other form(s) It took. Existence as we know it would end, and I’d still be sitting here, weeping insanely into a mound of yellow sheets. (Of paper, I mean. Not on my bed. I am not a bed wetter. Really.)

One last procedural note: there are other things I’d like to write about and other things I’d like to do with my life, for that matter I’m gonna do this in installments of seven items per entry. I’ll try to do them weekly, maybe biweekly. We’ll see. Also, in the interest of moving this shit along, I’m only going to provide brief notes for 5-6 of them. I’ll write at more length about 1-2 per installment.

That’s it. Let’s get down to the first set. The very loosely unifying topic of this first installment is self-love, I guess. Here goes:




The Reputation-

are a power pop band here in Chicago. They haven’t broken into mainstream radio. Yet. Give ‘em time. But they have achieved a reasonable amount of recognition on the indie circuit, especially locally.

The actions of the group are dictated by one Elizabeth Elmore, an amply talented, possibly megalomaniacal singer, songwriter and musician (guitar and keyboard). Liz is an ambitious, intense mastermind. (She probably hates being called Liz, but I feel like I know her well enough to take some liberties. I’m probably wrong, and she’d hand me my balls in a sling if she ever read this. But she won’t, and I’m willing to live dangerously where she’s concerned. She deserves no less.) She’s also a remarkably motivated woman, who juggles her music with a career in law.

I’m fascinated by Liz and her music—I’ll admit it. A larger-than-life persona has she. Not iconic, like say, Robert Johnson is iconic, but she is big—maybe even approaching Morrissey or Gary Numan, who are more analogous not just in emotional stature, but in their unabashed self-pity and grandiosity.

Liz—or the musical persona she puts forward—seems to lack much in the way of a sense of humor. I’ve seen her play live a number of times, and though she frequently mingles with fans after a performance, I’ve always been afraid to approach her. (Yes, granite jawed Steve Forceman, flees from Liz’s biting wit and terrible gaze.) But clearly, she ain’t unapproachable, and that’s to her credit, given the wall that many performers—even less established local type acts—build between themselves and their admirers.


I’ve seen her (them, sorry) live whenever I can, and I’ve listened to their first self-titled release more than I care to reveal. A lot. Though after one or two listenings, the group’s second release, To Force a Fate, has been relegated to my second string pile—meaning I may never listen to it again, unless I’m desperate for new material to absorb. That first album, though, is brilliant.

Music wise, Liz and her band are pretty great. They’ve got chops to spare, and don’t just caress you with pretty little songs. No, titanic passion is the rule of the day here, and you better believe they kick out some noise—especially live, where they’ll really pummel you. For a pop mainstream type pop band. Because one of the things I’m trying to say is that, noise aside, it is pop. Good pop.

Liz has always had the hooks. And they’re great hooks. You better believe she’s got a way with melody and song structure. She’ll have you humming along with her stuff in no time, even when, as is frequently the case at the live shows, things get pumped up a little close to 11. It’s still kinda noisy music! How great is that?

I don’t mean to give you the impression that they’re Sabbath or the Stooges, but they’re not afraid to be loud, or use feedback and shit like that. (Check out the ludicrously indulgent noise breakdown just before the climax of “For the Win.”) The truly excellent musical reference website The All Music Guide suggests that Liz’s previous band Sarge is similar to the Go-Go's and Sleater-Kinney, to name only a few from the list. I might go so far to say that if Sonic Youth and Olivia Newton-John had a love child, it’d be The Reputation, which may sound ludicrously extreme on either side, but if you average things out… Well, Liz is weird, and confused about what she wants musically, I’d guess, but that’s half the fun of being her fan.

The other half might be that first record. The Reputation opens with “Either Coast,” a sunny interpretation of that perennial rock n roll favorite, the car song. If it’s good enough for Chuck Berry, Liz figures it’s good enough for her. And with all the Deuce Coupes, Roadrunners, Pink Cadillacs and Thunderbirds out there, Liz is in fine company. You can bid farewell to your youth in your car, like Neil Young did in his old hearse, or start a revolution from the driver’s seat, like Public Enemy did in their 98 Oldsmobile.

Even if you’re just out cruising, it’s American glory, but Liz is onto something bigger than that. Like Bob Seger before her—another deeply analogous figure, if not a conscious influence—Liz is on the run. She’s fleeing all the pain in the ass and /or heart shit we all have to deal with everyday. But where Seger is focused on the poignancy of the situation, Liz is more concerned with the joy of escape, and she presents it to you expertly, with chugging guitars and pure beautiful swooping vocals.

It’s a masterful opener, introducing not just the infectious energy of the band, but the larger-than-life, operatically “confessional” Liz persona, which will quickly blossom in the second track, a rumination on weekend singles bar pathos. This one has a pretty melody that comes across as queasy, thanks to a slightly atonal lead guitar. It’s a fine bit of onimonapoetia that sets you right in the middle of the experience. This song also contains my favorite Reputation couplet: “a certain inept licentiousness/ an artless gluttony for squalidness and heated promises…” Try saying that one 3 times fast.

And I’m afraid we need to pause here to consider a characteristic of Liz’s lyrics: their literary aspirations. I don’t mean to be an asshole or unfair, though I may have crossed that line somewhere a few paragraphs back, but when confronted with language like the above quote, it’s hard not to picture Liz pulling out her dictionary and looking for something cool that rhymes with “promises.” At least for me.

Really though, the problem isn’t that the vocabulary is especially difficult. It’s more Liz’s use of it—the constructions—that frequently make the lyrics feel a little, uh, pretentious for a rock song. Not to mention muddled. A few examples from other tracks on the album: “Won’t waste my mind on things that can’t remain/ Same latent flaw keeps coursing through my veins…” (from “The Uselessness of Friends”—sounds suspiciously like those old United Negro College Fund, don’t it? ) From “Misery by Design, (a song that reveals Liz’s downright frightening hostility toward former lovers, a subject that I’ll touch on again in a minute): “ground the things we set aloft and burned them through a wasted premise: ‘we…’”

I’m a great believer in the value of nonsensical but suggestive imagery in rock. Despite my objections toward literary pomposity, I do like lyrics that take themselves seriously. As Run-DMC once pointed out, though, “It’s tricky to rock a rhyme that’s right on time…” Unfortunately, when they go in this direction, Liz’s aren’t. I like her best when she’s straightforward—just tells you the story. She can be damned powerful, if ever emotionally one-sided. Somehow, at these moments, her feelings seem more real—less contrived. Take “For the Win,” say, where she’s at the top of her game.

The worst song of all in this respect is “The Truth. “The first time I saw the Reputation, this one was my favorite number because of its downright punk rock potency and downright lovely melody. Then I found out what the lyrics were. I’ll spare you the quotes and just tell you that it’s some gibberish about Liz puking up the bad stuff inside her. I’m convinced that she wrote it as an exercise for her shrink, thought it was cool, and ran out and recorded it right away. One can only hope that, on later reflection, she was embarrassed, but given the fact that she still plays the song at shows, that seems unlikely.

An enormous chunk of the first record’s appeal is in its glorious marriage of a bit of punk noise to a bit of pop glory. On the second record, the balance has been lost, and that’s why it’s such a bummer. I understand that Liz wants some much-deserved recognition—and I don’t mean just a local nod, but an embrace by national chain record stores and radio stations. (She’s even been given a few nods by the national press—a blurb in Rolling Stone, even an interview in Playboy. Neither of which seems to’ve amounted to much, but is pretty impressive, you gotta admit.) Somewhere inside To Force a Fate, there’s still a vague edge, but you really have to dig, and who has the time for that when there’s still real passion in some of the new music out there? I won’t point the sellout finger here, but I will say that it’s unfortunate that Liz has chosen to pursue said recognition by watering her music down to something very close to AOR pap.

Given the assurance of the first release, the second one feels like a conscious cop out. It gives the (I believe mistaken) impression that Liz is so desperate for a hit record that she’ll go to almost any lengths musically to achieve it. (Almost, I say. She’s not as desperate as that other, already much-maligned Chicago Liz—Phair, I mean, whom the AMG also lists as a similar artist.) If, as a simple fan, I could tell Liz one thing, I would express my honest regret that she’s steering her ship this way, because I think it’s dangerously close to scuttling itself on some reef of mediocrity. (Not like that last metaphor, which was so laughably pompous and muddled that I had to leave it in. ) I loved the first record. The second one’s like mayonnaise on cardboard, and I hope it’s not an indication of where The Reputation is headed, cuz I don’t think I’ll be willing to follow.

(If I could say something else to Liz, I would plea with her to email me if she reads this. Despite my criticisms, which come from nothing but love by the way, she machine guns me. No other way to say it. I’m completely enamored. Though not in a creepy way, Liz.)

In one area, at least, Liz still refuses to compromise. If you so much as step on her toes, Liz has got a song for you, and you better believe that it’ll squash you into a sniveling blop of jelly. Man, I’d hate to have her pissed at me. I’d probably change my name, cosmetically alter my face and flee to Mexico. Liz doesn’t fuck around. Fortunately, in performance, the vitriol of these lyrics is undercut by over demonstrative look-I-took singing-lessons type diction, or the whole thing would be downright terrifying.

In her lyrics, Liz has never been about the other schlub, who’s usually a two-dimensional (one hopes) sketch of a lover. She’s about self –and generally self-pity at that—though she will hit an occasional rest stop for some self-aggrandizement. In part, at least, by goring you with a dismissal of your “simpering diatribes” (And again with the pompous lyrics! She’s beginning to sound like the pop toonz of Tantric enthusiast Sting for crissakes!)

If you think it sounds like Liz is less than compassionate, you’re right. But that’s OK. Hey, sometimes you need to wallow in narcissism, and when you do, Liz is there for you, offering emotional comfort food—a sort of pizza of the soul. But don’t, for a second, believe that she’s doing it out of sympathy. I hate to say it, but I don’t think Liz gives a crap one about you or me—except insofar as we might buy her records and give her fame. From her scramblings for mainstream success to her egotistical tantrums, Liz is in it for the win. And if you want a piece of that catharsis, you’re gonna have to come to her.

The Reputation is a deeply dorky record that embraces the values of contemporary pop music: the worship of me myself and I—my perspective, my pain. Its exponents are like the characters in Rashomon—deeply committed to their own self-serving view of “the facts.” But man, is it addictive. If you want my advice, I say go out and buy it now. (But avoid the second record like unprotected sex with a Siberian yak.) Handle with care. If its operatically staged emotion doesn’t pulverize you, you’ll thank me.




OK, so briefly now, six other things that have made my life more worth living:




Rashomon-

Nice segueway, right? Not a very obscure film by any means, so I hope I’m not gonna bore you by adding my own thoughts on Akira Kurosawa’s 1951 film commented on the individual’s tendency toward immersion in self. Just like ol’ Liz, the characters in this film see events exclusively, willfully from their own point-of-view. Somehow, each character’s recounting of a rape and murder is radically different. Invariably, in the telling, the speaker’s culpability decreases proportionally to a dramatic increase in the moral justification of his or her behavior. Unlike The Reputation’s music the film looks at this trick of perspective from the outside. In this way, we can see this “trick” in its unfettered, loathsome glory. Kurosawa maintains that it’s really a willfully compounded lie we tell ourselves. Reiterated enough times, the lie becomes truth, allowing us to maintain our often deceptive images of ourselves as “good people.”

At this point, the film probably sounds like an absolute bummer. For all its bleakness, Rashomon ends with a small, hopeful human moment. What’s more, it’s a profoundly beautiful film—beautifully shot, written, edited and acted. If you haven’t seen it, and it’s sounded over hyped to you, it isn’t. It really is one of the greatest films of all time.




Dante’s Inferno-

Think Rashomon sounds cynical? Moralistic? Misanthropic? Malmoogious? Well Alighieri, next to the Divine Comedy, it’s like an episode of Little House on the Prairie. Sure, Dante’s colossal paean to the glory of God ends beautifully, ecstatically, but along the way, it has some pretty vicious things to say about human nature. Its judgments are exceedingly harsh. And in part, bizarrely enough, it’s a rejection of compassion for the damned—a fixation on the well-being of the self—that wins the salvation of an individual soul. It’s about your personal relationship to God, and there’s little room for the distractions provided by other people—especially those who’ve lost their own way in the dark forest Dante wanders into at the poem’s opening.

Disagree with my assessment? Well, consider this:

Dante’s passage through Hell is meant to represent a refinement of the soul, a purging of all that is sinful or for that matter worldly. One of the qualities that has to be jettisoned the tendency to look at the suffering in the world around you and ask why. In doing so, you are questioning God’s wisdom.

There’s a moment in the Inferno that beautifully bears this idea out. Dante is horrified in the fourth circle of Hell to find that those who sought to see the future have had their heads turned around 180 degrees. They are always looking behind them as they wander about. Dante weeps, and Virgil scolds him saying:

Still like the other fools? There is no place
for pity here. Who is more arrogant
within his soul, who is more impious
than one who dares to sorrow at God’s judgment?

-Canto XX, lines 26-30

Not very evangelical, is it? (Maybe that’s a good thing. If I have to deal with one more frickin’ Jehovah’s witness proselytizing at my door, I’m gonna have an aneurysm and enter the kingdom of God or Satan early—probably headed to the latter, ‘cause I’ve been pretty lax in building a relationship to God.) That being said, the comedy blows me away, and it does reveal the love of God, (who apparently doesn’t want you to follow His example in terms of sympathy for your fellow souls).

I’ve been reading the John Ciardi translation. A poet in his own right, Ciardi’s gone to great lengths to maintain the spirit of the original. (Or at least that’s what he says.) He’s also provided ample notes and appendixes to clarify references and place the poem in context. It’s eminently readable, but beautiful, varying language within the text to suit the matters at hand—which I guess Dante was all about as well. I’ve been very grateful for it. It’s reminded me of the pleasures of reading.




Coffin Joe in At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul-

Yep—there’s scant hope or mercy to be found if you’re an unrepentant sinner. And yet, some people go out of their way to thumb their noses at God. (At least in the narrative arts.) What’s up with that? Are these people just two-dimensional caricatures—sorta like the villains lurking in Saturday morning cartoons, who feel compelled to remind us that they’re evil! Evil! EVIL!!!???

Well, apparently some of ‘em are, or we wouldn’t have Saturday morning cartoon villains, right? (Unless you don’t consider these to be artifacts of “the narrative arts,” which, let’s face it, is a pretty shaky concept when you get down to it. One person’s art is another person’s twaddle, making the establishment of artistic criteria into a sorta esthetic Rashomon. You’re sure you saw art lining the complete works of Stanley Kubrick like a esthetic corona, whereas I saw nothing—except maybe in isolated bits of A Clockwork Orange and 2001. Meanwhile, you don’t understand how I can appreciate the writing of Thomas Pynchon, which, to you, is a buncha of pretentious, muddled crap.

But then, I’ve gotten off-topic, haven’t I? Must be the peyote. Back to all these weighty questions about this hostility and/or contempt some people feel toward God, whether or not it’s based on evil, how it’s been represented in the “narrative arts, “etc., etc. Well, I don’t buy the evil thing. I believe actions can be evil, but not people.

I do believe in the conscious decision to indulge in evil behavior and in the idea that this choice is frequently linked to an abiding anger or disgust that the person in question feels for the basic nature of things, which may or may not be God, according to your own belief system. And certainly, this is often the shtick in the “narrative arts.” Here we find a legion of disgruntled misanthropes engaging in antisocial and sometimes downright immoral behavior. There’s Ahab. And Gladys Kravitz. (What bug crawled up her ass, anyway?) And the Joker. And J-Lo. And Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? And Iago. And Goneril and Regan. And Claudius. (Obviously Shakespeare was preoccupied by these questions of human evil.)

And then there’s Coffin Joe.

Coffin Joe, whose name is Za du Caixao in Portuguese, is the onscreen doppelganger of Brazilian director/screenwriter/actor Jose Mojica Marins, and he is one bad mother fucker. We first meet Za in the excellent film At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul. (I’m going to stick to this first film, of a lengthy series, by the way. Otherwise I’ll never finish this crapbunglin thing. ) Za’s an undertaker, and the physical horror’s he’s witnessed while plying his trade seem to’ve scuttled any sense of ultimate meaning he might once have harbored. And man, is he brassed of at God.

Well, actually, maybe his problem has less to do with anger toward the Creator, (though it’s definitely a contributing factor,) than it does with a deep, abiding disdain for all human life. It comes across as a sort of nihilism—the kind that’s particularly intoxicating to lapsed Catholics, which one assumes Za is, given the images that preoccupy him . However, while on the surface, Za’s preoccupations come across as a sort of petty rebellion—the shattering of some taboos in a thrill-seeking teenaged sorta way—he definitely takes it further than that.

Pretty soon, he’s blaspheming into the faces of his devout neighbors. He thinks God is a phony, he says, a coward, and quite possibly non-existent. The townsfolk are terrified and begin avoiding him, especially after he acts out violently toward one of them who challenges him. His pride grows in step with his bitterness and cynicism. And we all know that pride is the sin that got ol’ Lucifer tossed out of heaven like some cosmic drunk in the hands of a cosmic bouncer.

Anyway, Za embraces absolute cynicism—and though he doesn’t acknowledge its existence—evil. He takes what he wants—let the dignity, the desires—even the lives—of others get hanged.

And one thing Za really wants is a son. And not just any son. He wants to sire the little fella with his ideal woman, a local, terribly hot young girl. There are some obstacles facing Za however. For one thing, he’s married to a basically good woman. She’s gotta go, and with the help of an extra large tarantula, go she does. But there are still some kinks in Za’s plans, like the fact that his beloved, while not married is happily engaged to Za’s best friend. And she more or less loathes Za. So it becomes necessary for him to really do some work.

At this point, Za’s passing beyond cruelty and callousness and into sadism. He’s getting off on the pain of others, and this change pretty much confirms his transformation into an agent of pure evil, triggering a gypsy curse that stirs the dead, who carry Za down to his ultimate fate.

So what do we have here? Well, we’ve established that Za’s contempt for God becomes so vicious that it boils over into hatred for His/Its/Whatever’s creations. Is this simple Catholic schoolboy rebellion or cheap horror movie titillation? I guess I think there’s something deeper at work here—otherwise, Za’s misadventures would be nothing more than bathetic, and draw nothing more than laughs in the watching. They do draw laughs, its true, but they are uneasy laughs.

Still, what does it mean? For better or worst, this film is one more expression of self, the individual, (and it’s worth noting again that Za is Marins both physically and fictionally). Except here, the aggrandizement of self is, I think a front.—one that is harvested from Za’s own fear of death. Looking into a howling Nothing, he tries to put a brave face on it by denying It, thumbing his nose at It. But in the end, Za flinches and he is consumed. Like every one of us will be, sooner or later. Pop culture it may be—silly? in places, but as with so many of these obsessive meditations on I, the tragedy and the horror do register in the end—at least to me. (Cf. Gary Numan, Liz Elmore and an army of others, though I do have my limits. E.g.: contemporary fiction, i.e., Russell Banks.)

So take it or leave it, I’d advise you to march right down to your local specialty video store—or find one on the internet—and delve into the strange world of Coffin Joe. But as the great Neil Young once said: “Take my advice: Don’t listen to me.”




Ingmar Bergman-

Generally speaking, I find it difficult to single out “favorites.” Mood has so much to do with what grabs me at any given moment, and whether the matter in question is food or colors or sexual positions, there always seems to be some valid possibilities I overlook at these same moments. And though I’m a person who’s had to learn to function with a lot of self-doubt, with great certainty, I can tell you that Ingmar Bergman is, by far, my favorite filmmaker.

Maybe it’s self-doubt that makes the whole thing work. Certainly that’s one of Bergman’s defining traits, and the connection here is deeply personal. Coming to Bergman’s films is, for me, like coming home, in a sense. His characters seethe with pain, weakness, love and anger—with an almost insufferable humanity. In spite of what you may have heard though, his films do, ,often achieve great warmth. Check out Fanny & Alexander or Wild Strawberries for obvious examples. but all of his films are shot through with the same sense of closeness. It’s a bleak, but welcoming universe, where I feel safe, understood.

Again, Berman’s films are all about self, but here it is the self looking both inward and out—a self that first of all is most concerned with its discovery of true self, ugly as it may be, and then placing this in relation to its often painful surroundings. in this way, Bergman faces the same void Za de Caixao looks into, but instead of cursing it, cowering from it, Bergman’s characters reach out into it, all the while aware of their own flawed nature and hope that some other being, whose flaws also they can also see quite clearly, may touch their hand with something like warmth. (And in Bergman, hands and faces become colossal with emotional significance—to an unsurpassed degree.

My reaction to Bergman’s work doesn’t appear be to universal. In college, after reading his excellent autobiography The Magic Lantern, I descended on some classmates waving the book like a Baptist preacher, and said, “Holy crap! Didn’t he describe childhood perfectly? Wasn’t it exactly what yours was like?” They looked at me with a rich mixture of pity, fear and amusement. “Uh, no,” they said.

If you’re interested, I’d say read the book—it’s that rare autobiography that transcends fan interest and becomes something like literature. (If not literature.) More importantly, see the films. But don’t rush to The 7th Seal . It’s not bad, but despite its reputation, there are better Bergman films. I’d say go to Wild Strawberries or Through a Glass Darkly I first, though if you’re feeling really adventurous, try Persona. It’s great, but may be difficult, if you’re not into Bergman already.




Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works, Volume 2- To fully describe the difference these two discs have made in my life would be a monumental task. I’ll have to limit myself to something really short then, though it seems criminal to do so.

This disc contains several pieces of ambient electronic music, produced by one guy, Richard D. James, in his own home. Theoretically, it’s meant to lurk in the background, while you live your life. It doesn’t, because like Bergman, James finds something profound in introspection.

In some of my most troubled moments, this music has helped me find peace. To you, it may sound like new age in some places and like dissonant noise in others. I don’t care much for labels, so I’ll leave it at this: However he works, in this set, harshly or gently, James creates beauty. It’s a fine pair of discs, highly recommended.




So that’s it for this go around. I hope you’ll forgive me if I sign off sort of abruptly, as I’m burnt out from writing this shit. I hope anyone who read it dug some of it. And that you are well. Signing off now, but more installments are on the way…

I am a lameass...

At the risk of sounding vain... To anyone stopping by: Hi. Despite recent delays, a new entry is almost ready...

It's been 90% done for about a week now. Since then, work picked up, but has fallen off again. Look for the completed entry within the following week. It'll be there. Really.

Hope all is cool wherever you are... If you have time, sign my guest book. The link's at the bottom of the page.

Thanks...

Steve Forceman