What is this new emotion now? It sounds like a rusty gate. It feels like a butterfly wriggling from chrysalis. It tastes like cold beer after hot day of ordeal. I remember once as a child… it’s excitement. I’m excited about music.
And if you can’t see this, it is because you are American. In the perjorative sense. That is, you are fucking idiot.
And if there is one thing that this blog is not about, and that is backing up points with intelligent, well-reasoned debate. That is because if I have reached the point of comment, then I am likely in a blind rage, and am typing on the internet because it brings a deeper appreciation of screaming into a pillow, breaking your old GI Joes with a hammer, or kicking the cat. Because it is even more hopeless than all these things. On the Internets, no-one can hear you scream. It’s the answer to the question of trees falling in the forest: what if an idiot hears it? But he’s too stupid to articulate what happened? Welcome to the Internets.
But anyway, no reasonable debate. This is the Eschaton. If something is expressed here that is because all normal natural processes have failed to contain the pain within. The pain. Within. The Eschaton is Ragnarok and Revelations and that blind stupid catastrophic end. Welcome to The Eschaton.
So Charlie Wilson’s War is evil goddam propaganda. We will examine this systematically. Firstly, it stars Tom Hanks. Please name for me a film in which Hanks has portrayed someone loathsome. I need a villain. A Gary Oldman character. Or like Fiennes in Schindler’s List. Hanks is like Tom Cruise in that he only plays a fictionalised version that is the same as the fictionalised version of himself. Tom Cruise is both a superhero, and a devoted father, and you know, he may be a little untidy, he may be a bit irresponsible, but aren’t we all aye? And when Disaster Strikes, he’s got the cajones to deal with it and save the galaxy. Hanks is a little bit more sophisticated, but this is like preferring a Moritz to a Mr Whippy. Every character he has every played is a charming, egotistical, pretentious wanker. And this is Charlie Wilson. I seriously believe that Hank has a well-worn highlights tape of his career stuck to the inside of his VCR by substances as yet unknown to man, and every night, once candles are lit, he watches a teary scene from Philadelphia, rewinds, watches, rewinds, as gradually the windows steam…
And I’m worried about the casual portrayal of his character as a roguish everyman. He’s an everyman? If he’s a projection of American sentiment, if he’s even a kernel of how they see themselves, then show me the door - he’s a coke-snortin, misogynistic, douchebag. I don’t have a problem with these things. Because it’s Tom Hanks, he’s not a drug-crazed psychotic. We don’t see a red-dripping nose, crossed eyes, vacant stares, hyperactive rants and violent crashes. His hot harem of hired help is charming, not insulting. I am confused by all this. What are we for? What are we against? Next time headlines scream “Clark Does Dope: PM In Sordid P Scandal”, should I just laugh, wave my hand, and say “Oh, that crazy Helen! She does like a good time, doesn’t she!”. I thought I was supposed to gasp, call up Robespierre, txt Torquemada, email Himmler? Or do we now realise that the War on Drugs is just a matter of perspective and perception? It’s ok if Tim Hanks does it. But if you’re Johnny Depp, expect to be betrayed and locked up for the rest of your life. And your daughter will hate you.
What else does Charlie Wilson’s War say? Hmm:
* It’s OK for America to sit on it’s fat arse, so long as it has a conscience. You use this conscience to help people overseas by sitting on your fat arse, generating a fat paycheck by yelling at people until you get your way. Polemical this, yes, but I still see a lot of fat arses, eating donuts. Talking about foreign people with sad faces, yes, but in between mouthfuls. Of donuts.
* Charlie Wilson is the desperate feral crazy white knuckle hope of a doomed and damaged people. He’s the lazy godless dope-fiend who has been put into a godlike position of responsibility by his peers. But squanders it on materiality. But - once thrust into the harsh realities of the world outside their well-lit and air-conditioned supermarket of a nation - they get all teary-eyed and moral and spiritual. They attempt to relate - and nothing is more ridiculous than an elderly well fed senatorial WASP rallying the Mujahdeen, who point at him and yell ALLAH ALLAH - but this is not their world. They have stepped outside the natural. Helping the foreign is like saving wildlife for these people.
My greatest fear is that Americans are going to come out of this movie feeling that their country achieves good in the world. That one man can make a difference. Myths which need to be challenged, not erected like a giant ideological phallus and paraded about. That they can stay at home watching American Gladiators because their tax dollars are going to people like Charlie Wilson who are saving the world… somehow. Did anyone ever question, reasonably, what Wilson was trying to do? And I don’t mean the walls of cynicism various nameless characters who represented entire departments threw up. Did any of the Mujahdeen ask about the opportunity cost of their pact? Whether this bargain was at all Faustian? Did anyone have the foresight to realise that there is a direct fucking correlation between the Mujahdeen and Egyptians getting weapons training, and Al Qaeda? Or maybe why the Soviets were invading Afghanistan in the first place? There’s a scene where the fighter pilots laugh about how much of a cakewalk their bombing run will be. Obviously, I deduce from this, the Soviets don’t have enough room for picnics and frolicking (Siberia is rubbish for that), and need the rock strewn wasteland of Afghanistan for cossack dancing and Vodka Trees. Could I suggest that they were trying to access clear water? Seeing as how their two major ports - Vladivostok and Arkangelsk (Minsk) are covered in ice all the time, wouldn’t it be in their best interests to get a hold of the Indian Ocean? Oh shit. Yeah, that’s right, it was warfare. But not that pretend play warfare, the kind that doesn’t have a point, that kind that just happens. There was self-interest in both sides. Not some fucking sap who had his heart melted by sad-faces. If your heart isn’t melted by that already, then fuck you. And fuck you for being conned into thinking that the world is this simple.
Top 5 albums of all time?
Haud proprius ordo! Yes:
- The Jesus Lizard, “Head/Pure”
- Soundgarden, “Louder than Love”
- Discordance Axis, “Jouhou”
- Opeth, “Damnation/Deliverance”
- Mindless Self Indulgence, “Frankenstein Girls Will Seem Strangely Sexy”
I wonder if that last will ever end up a classic. I started listening to them years and years ago, when a friend from New York insisted I check out this unknown band, who’d just released this album a couple of months before. I played it, I thought it quite brilliant and unique, and so played it to my friends, who generally regarded it as an abberration against all that is natural and holy. So I’ve kept quiet about them. Now I see that The Kids have found their new album and their single has about 3 Million views on Youtube and I think, seriously, this band should be pop music. I want to see them sponsored by Coke. I want to see them performing at the Grammy’s, and for this to be ubiquitous. I am troubled by the unspoken assumption that they are like an alternative My Chemical Romance. Where the fuck did that come from? Anyways:
If you could be in any band/group, who would it be and why?
The Jesus Lizard, for Maximized Yow Proximity. Or Dimmu Borgir, to exist in a constant state of pure awesome…. and to use that power for evil. Mmm. Or the Mars Volta - they seemed Lost in Vistas when I saw them live. Or Soundgarden, to know what it was like to do everything utterly perfectly at every damn moment. Mindless Self Indulgence, so I’d be “Keepin up with all the Kids”…
What would be your ultimate concert line up?
Dimmu. The Lizard. Mindless Self Indulgence! Discordance Axis. Mastodon. Bleach 03! Princess Army Wedding Combat! Caroliner! The Residents! Melt Banana. Whatever Mike Patton’s up to. Opeth. Les Claypool’s Bucket of Bernie Brains. Bjork. Beck. Soundgarden.
First CD/tape you ever bought?
Kickin’ 5. I also read Stephen King and watched TV. I was young. I was stupid.
Song that most reminds you most of your childhood?
“Seven Seas of Rhye”, Queen. That song was fucking awesome, when I was eight.
All time favourite movie?
Dead Man & Paris, Texas. I saw this poster for AvP: Requiem the other day, and wondered why they’d make a sequel to one of the worst sequels ever made. And I started thinking about a sequel to Paris, Texas. “Paris, Texas: Requiem”. Twenty years in the future. This time, the incalculably old Travis has buggered off across the desert again, and it’s up to his grown up son to find him. Unfortunately, the future is post-apocalyptic, and filled with zombies. Remake of the classic scene: to escape the Zombies, Travis mimics their movements from across the street, and manages to befriend them.
Book you’d be most likely to recommend?
Gravity’s Rainbow. To everyone, even the most inappropriate, like my nine year old cousin.
Do you have any pets?
My cat is named Burt Reynolds.
Best Christmas present you ever got?
Presents from a girl named Dammit. I got: Apocalypse Culture 1 & 2, Art of Seeing Sideways, a bunch of Shirley Jackson, The King in Yellow… half a library filled with love!
If you’re vaguely interested in the Nobel Prize, here’s the results:
Medicine: My interpretation of the science awards may be off. But it seems as though three guys figured out a way to insert strands of DNA into the chromosomes of stem cells, and then fertilize mouse eggs to raise lab mice with ‘discrete genetic modifications’. These mice are known as ‘Knock Out Mice’. Sounds like Gattaca to me.
Physics: Two guys discovered ‘a new way of using magnetism to control the flow of electrical current through sandwiches of metals built at the nanotechnology scale.’ In other words, they described the physical process by which you’re able to have a hard-drive that isn’t the size of your house.
Chemistry: Apparently one of the better places to have yourself a chemical reaction is on a solid surface. Hence ‘Surface Chemistry’. There’s a process which describes the way the molecules are interacting with the surface, but nobody really knew how it actually worked. Gerhardt Ertl seems to have figured it out
Literature: Doris Lessing, “that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny”. I knew of her before the Nobel, which is good. But it is a safe choice. Boring. Thomas Pynchon has still not won. What’s the number for the Nobel helpdesk? Mine is faulty.
Peace: The IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) and it’s chairman, Al Gore, “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change”. Fucking awesome. This, like the 2002 award to Jimmy Carter, will be taken as a Fuck You to the Bush administration. Not that it’s about that, no no no. But awesome anyway. So yeah, America. Can we please elect Gore for President now? I mean… it can’t be any worse…
Which, due to sudden events, I shall be. So I decided to send away the majority of my books, too important to sell - my histories of the Illuminati, black magick, Crowleys, Regardies, Robert Anton Wilsons, Pynchons, Gaddis’, Hunter S. Thompsons… Well, here is what I decided to keep. It’s still too much, but still, I’m covering every contingency here:
Thomas Pynchon, “Gravitys Rainbow”
Thomas Pynchon, “Against the Day”
William Gaddis, “The Recognitions”
William Blake, “Random Collected Works of,”
David Foster Wallace, “Infinite Jest”
Charles Fort, “Complete Books”
Aleister Crowley, “Magick: Book IV”
Playboy, “Playboy Brunettes” (mate, what a book)
Taschen, “The Hermetic Museum”
Peter Stafford, “Psychedelics Encyclopedia”
It is very hard to pick just ten.
There aren’t many things I give a damn about, but I do give a damn about the hideous tragic farce that is the Nobel Prize for Literature. I’ll go to any extent to correct misconceptions of it. Even to the depths of hell itself: as proved when I ventured down into the Fifth Circle, which as Dante taught us is reserved for Harry Potter fans. I recently even corrected a fairly excited stub on the TV3 website (I know, I know) about the crew of the Spirit of New Zealand, who are being nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. They might win! Like Gandhi did, wow! Yeah, how about this for a story:
“Young Man Buys Lottery Ticket
‘It’s possible I may win money from this!’ he claims”.
There’s a couple of things you need to know about the Nobel Prize. Pretty much any tenured University Professor can nominate a candidate in their respective field. Neat! But what this actually means is that every Professor of Fried Chicken & Genocide from the South Dakota University of Etiquette is going to nominate someone like William Luther Pierce for that colossus of eridition: The Turner Diaries. I’ll bet you two fiddy that Mugabe has been nominated for a Peace Prize. Someone out there is bound to have a sense of humor.
The Nobel nominee list is kept private for at least fifty years after the nomination. And even then: try googling for a Nobel nominee list. I haven’t found one. That’s because it’s full of embarrassments, like the time Hitler was nominated for Mein Kampf, or the time Licio Gelli was nominated, for God knows what.
This whole Nobel silliness reached it’s peak during the Stanley Tookie Williams trial. They actually used in his defence the fact that his childrens stories had been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. What a fantastic defence: all I have to do is publish a book, bribe a professor, and murder as I please: if I’m nominated for a Nobel Prize, how could I possibly be anything but meek and bookish?
It is also important to not treat the laureates as belonging to some exalted canon, seconded only by the chorus of angels. There’s plenty of evidence that Mother Teresa was more shrewd and manipulative than we’d prefer to think. What was the hell with was giving a Peace Prize to… Kissinger? (the equivalent is giving one to Cheney for this years commitment toward peace). It’s a hit and miss affair. It’s crowning achievements, like the awards to Faulkner and Ossietsky, are shadowed by the lightweights (ie: Jelinek) and the undeserved. Winning the prize is just as likely to mean that you’ll be remembered as a bungled political decision as a great avatar of idealism.
My recommendation though is if you’re bored, online, and want to read something inspiring, check out some of the Nobel speeches online. I’ve only read some of the literature ones, I can recommend Pinter, Milosz, Kertesz, and of course Faulkner.
“In 200 years, when they are brushing seeds into baskets with their fingers, and a stranger appears with a new threshing machine that will do the same thing with less time and effort, they will need to say something smarter than “the Gods forbid it” or “that is not our Way.” They will need the knowledge to say something like:
“Your machine requires the seed to be planted alone and not interspersed with perennials that maintain nitrogen and mineral balance in the soil. And from where will the metal come, and how many trees must be cut down and burned to melt and shape it? And since we cannot build the machine, shall we be dependent on the machine-builders, and give them a portion of our food, which we now keep all for ourselves? Do you not know, clever stranger, that when any biomass is removed from the land, and not recycled back into it, the soil is weakened? And what could we do with our “saved” time, that would be more valuable and pleasurable than gathering the seed by hand, touching and knowing every stalk and every inch of the land that feeds us? Shall we become allies of cold metal that cuts without feeling, turning our hands and eyes to the study of machines and numbers until, severed from the Earth, we nearly destroy it as our ancestors did, making depleted uranium and polychlorinated biphenyls and cadmium batteries that even now make the old cities unfit for living? Go back to your people, and tell them, if they come to conquer us with their machines, we will fight them in ways the Arawaks and Seminoles and Lakota and Hopi and Nez Perce never imagined, because we understand your world better than you do yourself. Tell your people to come to learn.”
- Ran Prieur, “How to Survive the Crash and Save the Earth”
Ran Prieur exists in a realm beyond awesome. He exists in the future, and it is the kind of future that I would like to be a part of.
“The Last Judgment is an Overwhelming of Bad Art & Science. Mental Things are alone Real; what is call’d Corporeal, Nobody Knows of its Dwelling Place: it is in Fallacy, & its Existence an Imposture. Where is the Existence Out of Mind or Thought? Where is it but in the Mind of a Fool? Some People flatter themselves that there will be No Last Judgment & that Bad Art will be adopted & mixed with Good Art, That Error or Experiment will make a Part of Truth, & they Boast that it is its Foundation; these People flatter themselves: I will not flatter them. Error is Created. Truth is Eternal. Error, or Creation, will be Burned up, & then, & not till Then, Truth or Eternity will appear. It is Burnt up the Moment Men cease to behold it. I assert for My Self that I do not behold the outward Creation & that to me it is hindrance & not Action; it is as the Dirt upon my feet, No part of Me. “What,” it will be Question’d, “When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?” O no, no, I see an innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.” I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning Sight. I look thro’ it & not with it”.
- William Blake, talking about his painting, “A Vision of the Last Judgement”.
Yeah, mostly I think that Harold Bloom is a blowhard (Harold “I think the actual precursor to Swinburne is not Hawthorne but Twain, hmmhey” Bloom) as a literary critic, but I like his ideas about spirituality. Here’s his thoughts on Gnosticism:
” I propose a simplifying definition of Gnosticism in the apprehension of genius: it is a knowledge that frees the creative mind from theology, from historicising, and from any divinity that is totally distinct from what is most imaginative in the self. A God cut off from the inmost self is the Hangman God, as James Joyce called him, the God who originates death. Gnosticis, as the religion of literary genius, repudiates the Hangman God.
Hans Jonas, for me the most incisive guide to Gnosticism, said of the ancient Gnostics that they experienced “the intoxication of unprecedentness.” I recall remarking to Jonas, an intensely brilliant and genial person, that he had described what strong poets always sought for: freedom for the creative self, for the expansion of the mind’s conciousness of itself”
- Harold Bloom, “Genius”.
And then I read a much better book, Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool Acid Test“. It is a book which describes the possibility of being True and Vital. I kept connecting Kesey and Jack Parsons in my head, crazy prophets both, trying to destroy that, what, post-Lapsarian condition, is that what it is? When desire floods up like a crescendo, then the beat drops and it’s relief and we start again. But how to rise again from that plateau. Without repeating the sins of history. Jack Parsons wanted to bring about the Apocalypse, unleash upon the world the ultimate evil, because after that desire is spent, in that zero-point after orgasm, we will be refreshed. But afterward, we have to get up out of bed and go to work and fire people. It is a knotty one. I wonder if Kesey felt as though, here they were, given another chance, a key to the door to the garden, and they were the new disciples and, and then “we blew it”. Is that the answer to the question, the question of The Condition? That actually what it is is a stupid hunger? Or is it a massive Promethean weight of the aggregrate that pulls down the desire of the individual? Is it that Kesey, in those hazy Mexican delirium days, realised that the Garden had to be lost, that there are no singular points anymore, that we have only collections of pieces of other puzzles we jam together into a completed magic eye to be squinted and turned round until maybe we can see a whale or a pony or something.
I’ve been riffing on this one line, over and over again: “But what to do in that scary void beyond catastrophe, where all, supposedly, will be possible”. The way it seems to me, and the meaning that my 1990s 30 year too late naive imagination seems to gather from all this, is that that heavy phrase “We Blew It” refers to those selves, picking themselves up from the streets after the fire and brimstone has all been washed away and they’re all blown away by that cosmic visitation of the Godhead and the notion that all will be ok: well some fucktard is going to start up an insurance firm and we’ll be right back where we started.