VINTAGE AUGUSTINE

Manifesto

The distinguished black academic Henry Louis Gates found himself “boyed” by a cop in his own home, recently, as many of us now know. An interesting (and distressingly typical) response, of “white” males, to the story… even the “liberals”… is to opine that Gates was unwise in (presumably) back-talking authority. Ed Champion, a blogger famous for calling people he doesn’t agree with “douchebags”, intervened (as he has with me before) in a comment thread debate, on the Gates affair, by accusing me of “trolling”. The thread in its entirety (as of 11:34 CET) as follows:

[...] Those Who Resist the End of Racial Profiling [...]

Bat of Moon on July 22nd, 2009 4:23 pm

I was shocked by some of the comments to a Gates post on the LAT’s Jacket Copy book blog. There’s definitely an attitude out there that Gates deserved his treatment because he talked back to a cop, wasn’t deferential — didn’t bow and tug his forelock, I ’spose. The cluelessness is shocking. (And “clueless” is the most charitable word I can come up with for it.)

***

Andy on July 22nd, 2009 4:36 pm

There’s a more nuanced look, that draws a similar conclusion, here:

http://www.motherjones.com/riff/2009/07/how-henry-louis-gates-blew-it

It is, I think, a dumb idea to provoke a cop.

***

Steven Augustine on July 23rd, 2009 5:13 am

“It is, I think, a dumb idea to provoke a cop.”

It’s pretty dumb to fuck with the Klan, or neo-Nazis, too. People should definitely learn to be more docile in the face of potentially lethal authority wherever it is encountered. Gates should have said “yes sir, no sir!” in his own house while being bullied by a glorified security guard: that’s a no-brainer. It’s obvious that Gates’ body language and speech patterns are those of a hardened criminal and that the centurions therefore had no reason whatsoever to *not* jump to the conclusion that they were dealing with a felonious black-skinned niggra. Kudos to our quick-thinking troops.

***

Andy on July 23rd, 2009 1:15 pm

Well, I’ll leave it to you and Ed to behave belligerently toward “potentially lethal authority,” Steven. It’s not an endorsement of the actions of the police, or of their tacit policies, to suggest that the sane posture to take toward aggressive and armed men with the legal authority to use force is not necessarily the principled one. Sorry, there’s no quicker way to get a cop to put his hands on you than to tell him not to put his hands on you. And any further resistance is a chargeable offense, period, fair or unfair. You don’t have to be a University Professor at Harvard to know that there are better places to take your rage and better ways to seek redress.

***

Steven Augustine on July 23rd, 2009 2:23 pm

Andy, if no one’s brave enough to call the heavily-armed centurions on their ever-spreading attitude that “disrespecting” them is in and of itself a crime, how will the behavior stop? I think you (and the police) have forgotten what it is the police are supposed to do: protect the legally innocent from abuse… not expose them to it.

***

Andy on July 23rd, 2009 4:03 pm

I haven’t forgotten anything, Steven. Like I said, if you want to “call” the responding officer on his behavior, that’s your choice. You’ll have his foot on your back in a twinkling. I don’t quite understand the principle you’re defending. It’s too abstract for me. When a civilian is ordered to do something by a cop, or two cops, or more, the civilian has absolutely no leverage, irrespective of whether the civilian is in the right or not. It’s asking for humiliation, at best, beating and arrest at worst. You can’t be right, because the police decide what’s right. I don’t agree with it, it’s absolutely Orwellian, but that’s how it is, and that’s how it’s been since long before concepts like “Miranda warnings” and “probable cause” were admitted via the thin slit through which things gain entry to cops’ consciousness.

***

Steven Augustine on July 23rd, 2009 6:43 pm

“You’ll have his foot on your back in a twinkling.”

Well, people have been fire-hosed or billy-clubbed, by the police, for sitting at segregated lunch counters or swimming pools, too. It’s a mistake to assume those days are entirely over.

“You can’t be right, because the police decide what’s right.”

Uh, no, Andy. No.

***

Andy on July 23rd, 2009 9:58 pm

Good for you, Steven. Go for it.

***

DrMabuse on July 23rd, 2009 10:08 pm

Steven: You are trolling here. Knock it off. This is not the kind of bullshit I want to have on my blog. Andy has the right to his opinion. There’s no reason to badger him like this.

***

Steven Augustine on July 24th, 2009 3:20 am

Of course, Ed. Because you’re so gentle, circumspect, and never, yourself, pursue an argument. If only I had the class to follow your example. Next time someone disagrees with me, rather than respond (please note the absence of ad hominems in ALL of my comments), I’ll just forget my point and write “LOL”. Because nothing really matters, anyway. You’re just *pretending* to be passionate in your beliefs; you’re only passionate about your ego, obviously. I get it now.

Don’t bother banning me, you phony. Hope your fantasy as a “crusading journalist” pays off. LOL.

***

Is it really “trolling” to call attention to the faulty (and chilling) reasoning in Andy’s statement that “You can’t be right, because the police decide what’s right” ?

I’ve been referred to as a “troll”, or otherwise ripped into, by Ed and his followers before. I wonder if anyone without a chip on his/her shoulder, or a hidden agenda, can read the comment thread above and find anything (before my valedictory remark; yes, I was irritated) that would qualify as “trolling”? Is any form of contentious response, or dissent, to be labeled “trolling”, now?I take the time to leave intelligent, carefully-considered comments; I only comment on issues I A) feel strongly about and B) know enough about, in the first place, to comment usefully. I was under the impression that the definition of a “troll” is a commenter who attacks/disrupts/slanders for disruption’s own sake. Well, it’s a protean word. Ed Champion isn’t a “troll” for calling dozens of people “douchebag/retard/dipshit”… but I’m a “troll” for sticking up for the notion of Civil Rights in a comment thread appended to Ed Champion’s posting on… Civil Rights.

In contrast to my nasty experience of Ed’s apparent Bipolarity, I participated in a comment thread at Shapely Prose on the same topic. As a BOC (blogger of color), I first left a brief, supportive comment. Part of that comment seemed to be dismissed by another commenter and I left a longer, very carefully worded response. It is, after all, a subject close to me; I spent the first thirty years of my life adjusting to North American racism. Checking back on the thread a few hours later, I found that there’d been no response to my longer comment, and I thought: the irony’s too much! In a comment thread of (mostly) white females discussing a black man’s run-in with racism, I’m being ignored! I commented to that effect.

Rather than being banned for “trolling”, I got, instead, a half-a-dozen sincere apologies. An astonishing first in my ten years as a tiny voice of literary dissent/politically-critical thinking on the Net. More importantly, by addressing my complaint, the commenters made it clear to me that it wasn’t as simple as my POV being ignored/marginalized/anathematized… there were all kinds of other dynamics at work (or play).

Which I never would have known if we hadn’t all discussed the issue. In detail, even.

Following is the tail-end of the Shapely Prose “This is what happens to black men in America” comment thread, starting with the very moving (to my mind) apologies; the point being that these women weren’t even in the “wrong”, but took the time to respond with more than a STFU. I then enjoyed the luxury of discussing the topic in depth with brainy types who weren’t invested in owning the topic. Was the level of discourse higher than the one at Ed Champion’s literary tractor pull? By orders of magnitude.

A rare pleasure:

Kate Harding, on July 23rd, 2009 at 7:42 pm Said:

Steven Augustine, I’m sorry. I appreciated your comments, but about 99% of my comments on the second half of this thread have been trying to keep people from going down the rabbit hole, as opposed to expressing gratitude for the people saying smart things and adding value to the discussion. And of course, we did, in fact, go down the fucking rabbit hole since your last comment.

So yeah, the whole thing about how white women discussing white women tends to silence the voices of POC? Exhibit A, folks.
JoGeek, on July 23rd, 2009 at 7:44 pm Said:

But… some of my best friends are white women!
volcanista, on July 23rd, 2009 at 7:48 pm Said:

Well certainly, the history of race relations in Europe is just all around different than in the U.S. I think it makes sense that your experience there is very different, and that the kinds of racism you experienced might have been easier for you to live with than what you dealt with in the U.S. I don’t think it takes away from how others have experience racism in Europe for you to point that out, either (but neither does it erase their experiences).
JoGeek, on July 23rd, 2009 at 7:59 pm Said:

I had an interesting conversation with my s/o last night on this topic. He said that he had read an autobiography on cops and why they become cops. The author (and I apologise for the lack of specifics) said that cops essentially see themselves as hunters, not enforcers of justice. They are hunters, and they catch their prey. The book said that the cops do, for instance, wait on the Florida line and pull over any Latinos driving the speed limit, because they consider it basically as easy hunting for drug traffickers. Regardless of the fact that the majority of the people they pull over have nothing to do with the drug trade.

Is it any wonder that, having been raised in a culture where a POC is considered “prey” by armed figures of authority, that there would spring a natural suspicion and/or hostility towards the “hunters”? The most obvious evidence of institutional racism is when innocent until proven guilty is suspended at the most basic level, but only for a select few, and only based on the color of their skin.

Some people want to leap at one or two anectdotal examples of fair play, just so they can have the privilege of not thinking about it. But hey, so what if that particular and personal panacea is just an illusion? As long as you can sleep at night, right?
buttercup, on July 23rd, 2009 at 8:01 pm Said:

Steven, I’ve actually been giving a lot of thought to your comment about visceral disgust. It was a real eye-opener to me mostly because it reminded me of how people react with disgust to fatness. I think there may be a whole different set of complicated baggage attached to racial disgust that has roots in shame and fear more so than fatphobia. Do you suppose that (white american) shame and fear is why you don’t sense the visceral hatred in your part of europe?
fatsmartchick, on July 23rd, 2009 at 8:13 pm Said:

Steven I hope you didn’t think I was dismissing what you were saying with my post. Volcanista’s last post reminded me that I was assuming certain things didn’t need to be said when they did. So what I was thinking in my head and what I should have said was ‘Hmm yeah, I guess his experience would be different. Most European countries outlawed slavery 150 years before we did. They essentially defined the descendants of African slavery as humans before we did.’
But, I honed in on the comments about Turks and Arabs because, well truthfully, as an academic I get tired of hearing my colleagues talk about how much more superior Europe is… so I have a personal grudge against the whole continent of Europe. And I’m also knee deep in post colonialist literature. So I’m not trying to dismiss you or ignore you. I just have a bone to pick with Europe.
fillyjonk, on July 23rd, 2009 at 8:16 pm Said:

Yikes, I was just so relieved Steven wasn’t a troll that I figured we could let the interesting and substantive parts of his comment stand on their own. Sorry for making you feel neglected, there, Steven. It’s Good Kid syndrome — you get ignored for being informed and polite while everyone scrambles to contain the chaos that bad kids can create.
A Sarah, on July 23rd, 2009 at 8:19 pm Said:

Yeesh, Steven, you’re totally right. I’m sorry too.
Steven Augustine, on July 23rd, 2009 at 8:35 pm Said:

Definitely a first to get not one but a gazillion apologies in a thread like this. Deeply appreciated. I’m not high-maintenance or anything but I was starting to feel about Twilight-Zone-ishly invisible there (like: am I dead?)! Laugh

And, of course I wasn’t saying that there’s no racism in Europe. But, for example, my friend P., a British lawyer of Nigerian descent, told me that he was actually *terrified*, for the first time, being black, during his first State-side visit: it felt as though the police had a mandate to execute him for the slightest offence. He never felt that in the UK, as bad as things are there
Caitlin, on July 23rd, 2009 at 8:41 pm Said:

Steven Augustine, if it helps, one of the most important things I’ve learned is that when someone who isn’t white is talking about racism I need to shut the fuck up and listen. It’s not often that I manage that in any other arena, but I’m getting better in this one . So I paid a lot of attention to your comment, but I didn’t have anything useful to say back that didn’t sound like “Yes! And here is how I feel about that as Nice White Lady! You’re welcome.”
Lu, on July 23rd, 2009 at 8:45 pm Said:

Steven, that quick through-the-looking-glass snapshot of your British friend’s experience here is … I don’t know how to express it. I won’t say it opened my eyes, because I’m not notably oblivious, but I think it was its brevity that just flashed another kind of light here.
Caitlin, on July 23rd, 2009 at 8:55 pm Said:

Also, this

it felt as though the police had a mandate to execute him for the slightest offence.

is fucking terrifying.
Lu, on July 23rd, 2009 at 9:00 pm Said:

And continuing the comment-leapfrog with Caitlin , I agree with her comment that appears just above mine at 8:41.
Anwen-with-an-N, on July 23rd, 2009 at 9:02 pm Said:

Steven Augustine, if it helps, one of the most important things I’ve learned is that when someone who isn’t white is talking about racism I need to shut the fuck up and listen.

This.

Thanks Steven, your comments were really interesting.

When I went on school trips to France, Germany and Italy, [about 10-13 years ago] as part of groups who were in the first instance around 15/16 and mainly black/Asian [Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi] and in the second and third instances around 17/18 and still a fairly high proportion of students who were of colour, there was a very different feeling in Germany as opposed to the other two countries, partly I suppose because the French and Italian trips were to relatively rural towns as opposed to Hamburg and Berlin.

In France, except when we went on a day trip to Paris there was a strong feeling that wherever we went we (and specifically the black girls) were being watched in a suspicious sort of way. In Italy I was stopped, along with two girls (one black, one Chinese) and told that, I shit you not, “you look like a Benetton advert!” I mean, you know, points for trying, I guess, but jeez. In Germany, I honestly don’t remember a single incident (and the group I was with was at least as politically inclined as either of the previous ones, so it’s not like it would have gone unsaid…)
Steven Augustine, on July 23rd, 2009 at 9:06 pm Said:

A story: a very old friend of mine was in a middle class, two-job family; she owned a house in a nice neighborhood, with her husband, and it was with them that I stayed on a trip to the States in ‘95. She had a prosperous pet-watching business. One evening she asked if I could help the next morning by taking a few of the chores on… which would involve letting myself into about half a dozen houses, at the crack of dawn, in a tony (98%-white) neighborhood in order to feed pets while the owners were vacationing in Tuscany (or wherever).

Well, exploiting their hospitality as I was, I felt like a total shit saying “no” to the request. And she accepted my “no” but told me I was totally wrong (and paranoid/hypersensitive/behind the times, etc). She assured me that people just weren’t like that any more… certainly not the NPR-listeners in that lakeside enclave. And it was terribly frustrating for me that I could *not* convince her of the rationality of my concerns. And to this day (they now live on a splendid 50 acres in a fairytale house about an hour’s drive from a “liberal” city), she probably still thinks I’m a paranoid.

Unbridgeable gulf? Sometimes feels that way. I won’t even go into my recent experience of trying to explain my ambivalence towards the figure of Michael Jackson to white friends… (laugh)
Steven Augustine, on July 23rd, 2009 at 9:13 pm Said:

Anwen-with-an-N:

“In Germany, I honestly don’t remember a single incident (and the group I was with was at least as politically inclined as either of the previous ones, so it’s not like it would have gone unsaid…)…”

Well, that’s the irony, isn’t it? They’re on their best behavior now… after what happened last century. Not that they’re Post Racial, or anything, but I kind of like the fact that, for the Germans, plenty of “whites” are other “races”, too. And they actually often consider Persians (for example) superior to Germans.

Another tale of my friend P. He walked into a Berlin bakery soon after the inauguration and the guy behind the counter goes, loudly, “Hello, Mr. President!”

Still, it’s better than being Tasered.
Steven Augustine, on July 23rd, 2009 at 9:15 pm Said:

Alright, time to put my daughter to bed. Again: thanks, all.

S.
Gillian, on July 23rd, 2009 at 9:17 pm Said:

If only the mainstream media weren’t so goddamned predictable. You gotta love the Boston Globe. With newspapers dying a quick death, they’re keen to jump on this story and milk it for all it’s worth. I especially love the coded language in this opening paragraph.

“BOSTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama plunged his presidency into a charged racial debate and set off a firestorm in one of America’s most liberal bastions by siding with a black Harvard scholar who accuses police of racism.”

It must be nice for the average white person to not have to think about race. How squirmy it must make them when some radical POC brings it up to make them feel all uncomfortable about their privilege. Didn’t you know, that’s what we POCs live for?

GRRRRRRRRR.
volcanista, on July 23rd, 2009 at 9:18 pm Said:

On the other hand, I learned about several non-white grad students having a very, very hard time getting apartments in Hamburg. I know, anecdata and all that, and I can’t remember if any of the students were black (these were classmates of a good friend of mine, not people I knew). The impression I got from those stories was that racism was much less overt in many arenas, but it did crop up very obviously in certain situations. (Of course, I’ve also heard stories about non-German European whites being unable to get jobs in Germany, and non-French European whites unable to get jobs in France, etc. etc., so some of that is clearly not just race. There is some crazy nationalism shit there, too.)
Emma B, on July 23rd, 2009 at 9:23 pm Said:

From very limited experience with European racism (a year abroad in France), I noticed that as an outsider, it was often difficult for me to visually identify someone as being of a minority ethnicity. People of southern European and Maghrebi or Middle Eastern heritage often have similar features and hair/skin coloration (which is totally logical given that we’re talking about areas separated by no more than a couple hundred miles, with historical population overlap). Of course, there are French people of African heritage, who are obviously black, but the absolute numbers are much smaller than of Maghrebi heritage.

Do you think that the “viseral disgust” common to American racism might have something to do with how easy it is to peg someone as being Other?
fatsmartchick, on July 23rd, 2009 at 9:24 pm Said:

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/research/

I wanted to re-post this link for emphasis. Minerva posted it above and it went under the radar. It’s this project that’s been around for about 10 years. It tests people’s unconscious decision making in regards to identity and its very eye opening. It turns out I prefer Arab and Jews to white folks, have no preference for Asians or whites, and a moderate preference for whites over blacks- that’s changed for me since 2000 which was the last time I took it. It used to be a slight preference for whites over blacks. I don’t think its an accident that in 2000 I had been living with African Americans in the dorms and the last ten years have been in a pretty segregated city and a very white grad program.

The point is that people can see the way in which the cop might have made the kinds of snap judgments that he did with Professor Gates. And in the privacy of your own home you can see some of the things that may be operating in your own perception of the world.
Steven Augustine, on July 23rd, 2009 at 9:36 pm Said:

Emma B:

(we’ll see if my daughter stays asleep…)

“Do you think that the “visceral disgust” common to American racism might have something to do with how easy it is to peg someone as being Other?”

Oh, without a doubt. After centuries of blacks being livestock, essentially, in North America, there’s no way that the physical reality of so-called blackness will be accepted, on all levels of the psyche, across the board there, as truly “human”, any time soon.

Whatever the attitudes of the strangers I interact with, superficially, in Europe (even the skinheads), they don’t seem to have a problem *looking at me*. Whereas, in North America, in even the best circumstances, being black feels like having a weird birthmark. There’s the aura (subtle or not) of embarrassment and taboo attached to it. And this is a heavy thing to experience every single day… I didn’t really notice it until it had stopped.
Steven Augustine, on July 23rd, 2009 at 9:40 pm Said:

(In case anyone is confused: my avatar is a joke; my favorite photo of a close, 34-year-old friend at the age of five. It could be worse: I have a black friend who refuses to give up her Homer Simpson avatar)
Steven Augustine, on July 23rd, 2009 at 9:51 pm Said:

fatsmartchick:

(first I feel ostracized, now you can’t shut me up; I promise I’ll fade away soon):

“The point is that people can see the way in which the cop might have made the kinds of snap judgments that he did with Professor Gates.”

But if you look closely, you can see how reading H.L. Gates as any kind of criminal presence, or physical threat, goes beyond snap-judgment and slips into the realm of fantasy narrative. If Gates were huge and inarticulate and 20 years younger and dripping with gold chains, the profiling might still be rather unfair… but not entirely absurd. But H. L. Gates? He’d look like a harmless academic in his underwear. Where are all these fantastical layers of projection coming from?
Lucy, on July 23rd, 2009 at 10:03 pm Said:

Oh no- did anyone get a load of this?

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106936583&sc=fb&cc=fp

Apparently the officer that arrested Professor Gates TEACHES DIVERSITY CLASSES TO THE POLICE DEPARTMENT.

It is just like I said before- where on earth do the police get their information on diversity anyway if this kind of thing continues to happen?
fatsmartchick, on July 23rd, 2009 at 10:06 pm Said:

I agree with you. If you’ll see from my posts above, I think the whole idea of Gates being seen as a criminal is nonsense.

The study that Minerva linked to allows people to essentially see what they prefer among headshots of white and black faces. Then they have another that tests how much you associate dangerous weapons with black or white faces. It gets some people past that point of “I’m not racist because I have black friends.” or thinking racism is something people consciously, purposefully do and thus ‘I don’t have to examine what attitudes I have because I don’t use the n word.” The cool thing is that it also allows POC to test their own perceptions and even see some self-loathing tendencies that come from living in a racist society. There’s also a test on there for fatphobia. I prefer fat people to thin people. hmm.
Steven Augustine, on July 23rd, 2009 at 10:23 pm Said:

fatsmartchick:

I’ll be perfectly honest and admit that I have a lookist allergy to certain *dress styles*; I pre-judge the hell out of guys my age trying to dress in “with it” fashions (and wraparound sunglasses). But if they open their mouths and junk doesn’t fall out, I’m pretty sure I let the prejudice go.

But my family/heritage is very, very mixed and I just don’t look at dark people or pale people and assume I know a thing about them. My range of friends is almost impossible… but I’ve constructed a fragile bubble of Post-Gender and Post-Race that I can only maintain by staying put. In many ways, it’s just a simulation.

I don’t want my daughter to deal with that ugliness (she’s 3) but I’m afraid I won’t be able to keep her in a bubble about it.
Arwen, on July 23rd, 2009 at 11:58 pm Said:

Stephen Augustine –

As a Canadian and in a somewhat different racial culture – although not without racism, by any means, but with *differing* racisms – one of the things that hits me every time I venture into the states is that class and black/latino/white stratification seem really intertwined and obvious. The same can be said for Canadian society and our serious systemic oppression of the First Nations folks. I tend to see race and class intersect a lot.

My impression was that Germany was a little less desperate on the lower economic rungs but I have no real sense of whether race and class are heavily intertwined with that. Have you felt a difference in class assumption in Germany?
Arwen, on July 24th, 2009 at 12:00 am Said:

Sorry. STEVEN Augustine. Apologies. I PH’d you.
Steven Augustine, on July 24th, 2009 at 7:59 am Said:

Arwen:

It’s my sense that race and class are *always* intertwined; especially if you substitute color for race where necessary (in places like Brazil or India). The difference between the US and Germany is, I think, again, down to the North American slave trade. And the whole people-as-cattle thing. You can’t treat people like literal cattle for longer than a place has been a country and suddenly start thinking of these “cattle” as people with the flip of a legislative switch. It just won’t happen. And so many of those antebellum tropes are still with us, in the form of popular entertainment… what’s a “gangsta rapper” but a modern embodiment of the Mandingo riff?

Assimilation has always been the way for a subculture to ease its way out of these discriminations (no one considers the Irish or the Italians inferior or even non-white, in North America, any more). In the case of blacks, I think, assimilation is harder because of the sheer physical Otherness of being black. Even Asians, otherwise physically other to “whites”, have straight hair. Which could lead us to a discussion of hair-straightening in blacks (and Michael Jackson)…

My theory is that the only hope is “reverse assimilation”… the rest of America getting a little browner, and curly-haired, as in Brazil, as lead by small vanguard of race-mixers. It’ll take a bit longer. And by then, of course, it’ll be something else: religion (as in Muslims) or class.

I’ll go weirder here and say that it’s my theory that Negrophobia is a case of projection. The Nazis projected essentially German (or human) traits on the (German) Jews in a paroxysm of self-hatred and tried to wipe them out.

I think it’s the same with Negrophobia in North America; I think whites, for the large part, live a fantasy life in which they identify themselves with impossible avatars of whiteness on movie screens, and find blacks repulsive by projecting their own rejected (human) traits on them. Blacks are looked-down-upon for being human (sweaty, sexual, smelly, violent, lazy, fat, etc) and whites think they’re Brangelina (sp?).

Not all whites do this, of course; I’m talking about a Zeitgeist like, say, Bushism, in which it may only be the case that 52% of the people are doing it. But it’s enough to cause all the problems.

Finding an enlightened thread like this one certainly helps to give me hope.
fillyjonk, on July 24th, 2009 at 12:27 pm Said:

I’ll go weirder here and say that it’s my theory that Negrophobia is a case of projection.

It’s interesting that you say that whites are essentially asking blacks to accept their projected/abjected humanity. I would have interpreted it in basically the opposite way: as a literal scapegoating, transferring your sins and fears to (what you perceive as) an animal and then casting them out. Certainly that’s how I’ve interpreted Nazi xenophobia. I feel like the “animal” part is crucial there, since there’s a (symbolic or literal) sacrifice involved.

Though I guess disagreeing over whether racism involves seeing people as “too human” or “too animal” is sort of moot… since humans are animals, and it sounds to me like when you talk about blacks being looked down on for “being human” you mean the particularly animal parts of it, which some people might want to abject in favor of a more… deified version of humanity, for lack of a better word.

To get back to the main point of the thread, I’d put a finer point on your last graf: it’s not even that 52% of people are (necessarily) doing it; it’s that the culture is a priori racist (we’ve never had a zeitgeist where that isn’t the case) and only some percentage of people question and challenge that explicitly. Racism in this country doesn’t have to be something you perform. It’s something you’re already steeped in, and choose whether or not to resist.
Steven Augustine, on July 24th, 2009 at 2:15 pm Said:

FJ:

In total agreement. I think we can reconcile our last two comments if I clarify by saying that the abhorred “human” I’m referring to is the Animal reality, and that the etherealized version, up there on the screen in the form of Brangelina, is the Angelic that the viewer identifies with. It’s the difference, too, between the average “white” person’s vague notion of history as a Merchant and Ivory flick of pale sylphs flouncing around grand old English estates… and the reality of smelly, sometimes chancre-ridden humans taking dumps in lidded buckets kept in the wardrobes overnight. Laugh!

As a child of the 1960s, I was well aware of white children taking pride in an imaginary patrimony that stretched all the way back to British actors mouthing plummy orations whilst posing in pristine togas in front of various landmarks of ancient Rome… while I was asked to imagine my great great great great great great grandparents squatting naked in bushes and ooh-ohh-ohhing like chimps. The mechanism of which is all just a fraction of the problem of racial self-image, and projection, we witness in a cop’s inability to treat HL Gates with “white” respect.

“Racism in this country doesn’t have to be something you perform. It’s something you’re already steeped in, and choose whether or not to resist.”

Right. On.

buttercup, on July 24th, 2009 at 3:39 pm Said:

“Racism in this country doesn’t have to be something you perform. It’s something you’re already steeped in, and choose whether or not to resist.”

That’s about the most apt thing I’ve heard all week. It deserves to be stitched into a sampler, made into a bumper sticker, printed on a tee shirt, and written by skywriters all over the world.

celeloriel, on July 24th, 2009 at 4:56 pm Said:

Thank you, Kate, for this excellent post.

And thank you, Shapelings, for an awesome discussion in the comments. (Steven Augustine, haven’t seen you ’round these parts before, but you rock, and your comments have been very, very interesting to me. Thank you.)

I’d comment more substantively, but everything I feel I ought to say has already been said.

***

In other words, the Literary Internet isn’t all just complacent white guys throwing beer cans at the pesky gadflies. Nice.

July 24, 2009 – 3:43 pm Categories: critiquing critiquers, disinterested score-settling, vanities and veritas | Post a comment

Tagged 1 Ed Champion, 2 the micro-emperor's new speedo, beer cans, blog traffic vs critical thinking, chilling docility in the big red face of facism, conformity, dissent, owning the topic |

The Kong of Pap

Kong of Pap:1

Multiple Choice

1. Is the overwhelming over-production of cookie-cutter encomia in the wake of a famous song-and-dance man’s death a sure sign of:

-a. the triviality of encomia

-b. the triviality of life

-c. the power of consumerist brainwashing

2. If The Subject (in his quasi-military uniforms, aviator sunglasses, security phalanxes and exotic-animal-stocked mega-compound of remorselessly bad taste) effectively impersonated the African “strong man” dictator archetype, why? Because:

-a. the African “strong man” dictator archetype meme is ever-present

-b. the African “strong man” dictator archetype meme is a racist stereotype best confronted via infiltration, co-optation and subversion

-c. he who can, will

3. Would The Subject’s apparent thing for little boys have been marginally less cringe-worthy if:

-a. society were more tolerant of alternative lifestyles

-b. The Subject’s affectation of pre-adolescent enthusiasms didn’t read like a blatant trap

-c. at least some of the little boys had been black

4. Which motto would best sum up the oxymoronic core of The Subject’s presentation?

-a. inspiration by intimidation

-b. protective predation

-c. the red-herring of so-called blackness

True or False

1. Ludwig van Beethoven was a genius = John Lennon was too intelligent to be a genius = The Subject was too talented to be intelligent. T/F

2. Paradox: after 50 years of being saturated in Mass Media’s radiation, the populace is not less naive/credulous about its machinations but infinitely moreso. T/F

Essay Questions

Is it cheaper to bleach black skin or remove it?

A:_______________________________________________________________

_________________________________________________________________

Can we pity what we envy?

A: ________________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________________

Are the popular prodigies the easiest type of prodigy to come by? (ie, a child who can do surprisingly well what many adults can do considerably better; eg, a four-year-old who can perform rudimentary algebraic proofs, impressing the masses as being a manifestation of genius on a par with Einstein’s, though the four-year-old’s work, submitted anonymously to an over-worked junior high school teacher with credit problems, might earn an unceremonious “B”)

A: ________________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________________

Did Rock-n-Roll itself morph from being a gifted black youngster to a banal white hag in roughly the same amount of time it took The Subject to make the journey?

A:________________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________________

Kong of Pap:2

Folks, I’m goin’ down to St. James Infirmary,
See my baby there;
She’s stretched out on a long, white table,
She’s so sweet, so cold, so fair.

PDVD_206
PDVD_211

When I went down to Old Joe’s barroom
On the corner by the Square
The drinks we all served as usual
And the usual crowd was there

Up to the bar I saw Big Joe beginning
With these eyes bloodshoting red
Gather round and now all you seen us
I’m gonna tell you just what Big Joe said

Now, when I die, bury me in my straight-leg britches,
Put on a box-back coat and a stetson hat,
Put a twenty-dollar gold piece on my watch chain,
So you can let all the boys know I died standing pat.

PDVD_221

An’ give me six crap shooting pall bearers,
Let a chorus girl sing me a song.
Put a red hot jazz band at the top of my head
So we can raise Hallelujah as we go along.

Folks, now that you have heard my story,
Say, boy, hand me another shot of that booze;
If anyone should ask you,
Tell ‘em I’ve got those St. James Infirmary blues.

Well, on my left stood Joe McKennedy
And his eyes were bloodshot red.
When he told me that sad story,
These were the words he said:

I went down to the St. James infirmary,
I saw my baby there,
She was stretched out on a long white table,
So cold, and fine, and fair.
Go ahead!

Yes, sixteen coal black horses
To pull that rubber tied hack.
Well, it’s seventeen miles to the graveyard
But my baby’s never comin’ back.

And if anybody should ask you who’s been singing
If anybody should wanna know who wrote this song
Just tell him Big Joe was here this morning
And he was here this morning, yeah, but now he’s gone

June 30, 2009 – 12:04 pm Categories: debunk dafunk | Post a comment

Tagged degrading pop, enriching discourse, fans, jackson, loon walk, moon walk, skin bleaching, transcending race, uber-credulity |

Muster of Triviums

Muster of Triviums-On Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine

(downloadable pdf)

This is X-Posted at Daniel Green’s Critical Distance

June 15, 2009 – 6:58 am Categories: Litcritters | Post a comment

The Hi-Quality Sci Fi Blaxploitation Screenplay Sensation of the Year

the-hi-quality-sci-fi-blaxploitation-screenplay-sensation-of-the-year1

April 25, 2009 – 2:58 pm Categories: waste not want not | Post a comment

Art Annoys

3′ x 5′ acrylic on canvas-1985

“During the civil war, Trotsky wrote a book on art.”

-Harun Farocki, Dog From the Freeway

I was shaping snakes and mice in clay with my three-year-old in the year 2009 when the penny finally dropped and I realized I was handling a feces analog. The Art we were making was shit. My daughter probably knew that all along (and quite happily), but for me there had been a long gestational period, the decades during which I’d deluded myself into believing that the basic materials I was handling, in my life as an Artiste, were stardust and fairy diamonds.

My father was an Artiste; his life-sized canvases of hexagonal moons and primeval women (left breasts exposed) are almost as big a part of my childhood memories as the stink of his turpentine. He was an epic womanizer and his shoe of choice was the sandal. When I was ten we had a falling out. He had me taking Arabic classes on the weekends, but I balked as any headstrong ten-year-old would. I do not regret balking. The Arabic classes were meant to prepare me for the move he was planning to North Africa (the goal eventually shifted to another part of the continent). To that end, also, when I spent the night at his bachelor pad on weekends he’d have the heat turned up to unbearable levels to build a degree of tolerance. In my pre-pubertal mind, Sandals and Girls and Unbearable Heat were fusing into one awful urge called Art.

My father finally made the move to a faraway land in 1980, with a whole new family, which is the only way he could have done it, and it was in the primitive villa they moved to (guarded by his Korean-War-era rifle, a rifle the government of Liberia eventually confiscated because it was bigger than anything in the nation’s armory) that he found his muse. He painted portraits of the locals and since it was the habit of the locals to return to him indignantly, weeks later, demanding the portraits “back”, he built a secret room under the villa to store what ended up being eight hundred canvases, a respectable oeuvre. There was a curfew in town, imposed by a gang of naked cannibals who called themselves something like The Butt-Naked Cannibal Boys: if they caught you outside at sundown, you were supper. Inspiration was plentiful. The paintings my father produced in exile were stripped of hexagonal moons and lyrical tits because he was no longer guessing at the contents of his imagination: he was finally living in it. He later died in Vegas.

It was in 1980 that I began receiving instruction from Tim, the mendicant monk of Art. He impressed me by drawing a perfect copy of the so-called Mona Lisa on the title page of a book in the public library and then tearing it out with fearless aplomb. This was long before Philistines became important people by learning to influence the conversational choices of even the angriest young men and women. It had been, by the time I met Tim, a couple of years since I’d dropped out of the expensive private college (known for its rich foreign students: Kofi Annan is an alum) that I had been packed off to by rich relatives who didn’t give a damn that I’d shown artistic promise. Swaths of both sides of my family had money but not the shred of the part I was born to. A Dickensian set-up.

Among the beautiful nightmare characters on campus we had an actual son/grandson of text-booked Bauhaus potentates: Conrad Feininger. He was tall, dressed like an adult with money in the bank, spoke with an envy-seedingly sinister accent and (I remember it thusly but it can’t be true) wore a monocle. He wanted to do something to a girl I wanted to do something to and I felt that as a congenital Artiste from a storied dynasty of suave European fuckers he had every right. I lacked ambition.

It was expected that I would use the time at this college correcting the frivolous mistakes my father made to make us poor. But my luscious spirit balked. The clearest memory I have of quitting school is walking out of the dormitory on a leafy warm day, carrying, with a friend’s help, a large table from the dormitory’s second floor lounge. I had convinced this friend that if we looked blasé enough while doing it, we could carry the thing off-campus with no one to stop us. It was about a ten block walk to the basement flat I shared with other students who had been inspired by me to also drop out. The table was heavy but worth the effort. We lived right up the street from the favorite circuit of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s skipping-and-running and sometimes sulking boyish ghost.

We were three or four young men and three or four young women unified by a heroically naive delusion of infinite possibilities and our smelly beatnik clothing. Sometimes we’d all strip and lull on the futons listening to Joan Armatrading. Periods and spermcounts synchronized and there was a daycare’s worth of abortions. I remember with a shudder of deferred lust a toy-faced girl from North Dakota handling my genitals with experimental ginger one evening in the communal bed whilst I feigned sleep because I wasn’t quite into her. The imaginary girl I dreamed of seeding in those days resembled the female figure on the cover of the Layla album and this girl from North Dakota looked nothing like that, with her big eyes and button nose and perkily doomed aura of Karen Carpenter.

The only chocolate-free drug I’ve ever taken was LSD (never grass, never coke, never booze or beer or heroin or ecstasy or meth or poppers or peyote or cigarettes and very little coffee) and that was the year I dabbled in it. Thirty or forty excursions on the brand of acid that came on little tabs of paper we imported via connections in the drama department. The drama teacher was a jumpsuited man with a Pan-beard whose signature theory of Method acting held that to be stabbed is to have an orgasm. There were lots of plays with stabbings. I took LSD and tried eating five hot dogs and this didn’t work. My then-girlfriend, looking exactly like a big aqua-and-white butterfly, straddled me after I spit the mulched quasimeat into a fern and drew my fluorescing seed into her anus.

I wanted to paint something grand.

I cut off most contact with my family, experimented with a sequence of horrid jobs in a department store (from loading dock to in-house repair to sales) and found I preferred to be self-employed as a house-painter/hedge-trimmer/ floor-refinisher and so forth. The only truly bad memory I have from this period was my having fucked some decent burgher’s hardwood floor so badly that I fled the scene in media res (or in flagrante), only to skulk back the next day to undo the damage while burgher oversaw until I finished and left, sans word or cheque.

The funniest work memory I have is from the loading dock days: a svelte, chic, nipply buyer striding towards a pallet stacked with imported shoes under the pumped-in workdisco of The Stones’ Miss You whilst my fellow apes went super-horny nova with Puerto Rican curses of hate and approval. Styrofoam packing material flying everywhere suddenly like New Year’s. It wasn’t until my youth was definitively spent (or invested) that I started earning good money selling anything finer (I am a composer) than my back-broken labor. Even now, in the 21st century, a decade after hauling my last infernal ton of bricks, or smearing my final vaulted ceiling with eye-spattering paint on the end of a wobbly pole, I look more like a construction worker than an intellectual.

My beautiful young wife (an actress and classically-trained musician) recently asked me to paint the kitchen and all she got was a look.

2

author's father in Korea

“Wow, obscure terms. English major, are we? But, I couldn’t agree with you more. Thanks. “

-RedWolfSV, from a comment thread about a Kara Walker video¹

Tim the monk wasn’t a monk in the strictest sense because he wasn’t affiliated with Buddha or Christ, but as a penuriously unfuckable artist who lived in a garret he was Christ. He taught me that the world will always be hostile towards any Art that deserves the title and that the world’s suspicion and hostility coil neatly in the sweetest crannies of the richest implications of the word. When it was Art’s clear function to propitiate the Gods, the Artist was resented-but-tolerated. Minus the Gods the tolerations fade rapidly.

Tim would say Modigliani, and the word was always gifted with the same Italianate flourish of his bony hand. From his correct pronunciation of the Great One’s name (soft “g”) I learned, in fact, to correctly pronounce the trendiest restaurant in the trendiest neighborhood of the city, knowledge that required five years of gradually becoming a shallow, trendy, cunt-drunk prick before I could use it.

I taught myself to paint in a windowless room in a larger flat I shared with an anarchist and his ballbusting, helmet-haired, shovel-jawed girlfriend. Her allure whistled high above my head. I painted under a red bulb at midnight and feasted on jacket potatoes spirited home in an origami tinfoil swan and found myself with four or five girlfriends. The Psychedelic Furs became very important to me.

I walked into a 24-Hour grocery one night, reeking of turpentine (flirting with oils and Oedipus), hoping to buy a frozen cheesecake with a pile of quarters and dimes and the bleary-eyed hipster at the cash register had the radio tuned to a college station that sounded like it was broadcasting from the Urals, playing an unknown group called The Clash, which I hated because it sounded too earthy. Snow fell and I ran through it with frozen cheesecake. I began dating a fellow Artiste and discovered on the fourth date that I’d hit the jackpot: she was both virgin and orphan. She fed me an Xmas turkey that red oil paint had somehow worked itself in with the stuffing of.

Tim was missing teeth when I first met him and still more were long-lost by the time we last spoke, on a street corner, me just visiting the country for a few weeks from a new home in Europe, dressed in smart Berliner black and Tim just a wraith’s dingey sneeze, a total coincidence, a little awkward, fifteen years after the day he first made me his wide-eyed pupil by penciling a perfect Mona Lisa on a page torn boldly out of a library book. Perfect and from memory. The hands of Tim’s Mona were the hands of the woman herself, a pictorial stresspoint where every element of the composition locks together.

Why do so many blush at /despise/recoil from anything questingly original in Art? I can answer that question, but I won’t. I recently received this email from an otherwise worldy man, a man in the bigtime music business, friends with superstars and a guiding hand in the formation of two recording artists so huge that anyone born after 1960 would laugh if I namedropped them here. He wrote:

“After a lot of years of looking-and-listening, I’ve come to the conclusion that ‘everything’ is a marketing exercise! I think anyone who produces art in any dimension, and says they did it for themselves is a liar. If they did it for themselves, why are they showing it to us???”

Tim was already thirty-something when we first met, incisors gone and sporting the Van de Graaff coif of the malnourished/mad. I learned soon enough to avoid riding buses with him because his favorite sex substitute was to sit in the back and extemporize weird melodies about the various failings of the lemmings, quislings, capos and dupes he believed we were sharing the bus with. I learned soon enough not to go with Tim to the cinema or grocery store or art gallery because the songs he made up for the bourgeois assassins of promise were much worse. He’d come down to my room at midnight a few times a week with a gallon of orange juice and talk for hours.

He taught me to be militant about Art. But I compartmentalized his influence because I did not want to end up like him. I liked sex with pretty girls and I wasn’t willing to forsake that pleasure for a howling gawk at the deafening core of the heartless furnace of aesthetic Truth.

¹”Any Black Artist who manages to go beyond the condescended-to level of the kitschly reassuring and second-rate can look forward to vicious attacks… often from other Blacks. Sad but inevitable.Walker’s work is an exquisitely delicate kick in the nuts. You don’t get it. Fine.”

3

3" x 5" acrylic on masonite-1990

“We are each a slimy apparatus of interacting liquids.”

-John Updike, Toward the End of Time

We were all so terrified of herpes. Articles about herpes appeared in the Vogue yet girls were falling ripe from the rafters like pomegranates. They were rolling soft from behind the arras. Uppermiddleclass ingenues with Planned Parenthood diaphragms in Pee-wee Herman purses reading Anäis Nin at the laundromat. It’s not politically correct to describe the atavistic sensation of wellbeing a young man sometimes feels when feeling rich in females so I’ll leave it at that. Not that this feeling is a strictly testicular dispensation, for I’ve known young women who collected men; who amassed portfolios of men; who collected and traded men like baseball cards. I can think of a specific example.

Half-Cuban… a dancer with fuckedup legs. Evangeline was olive-skinned, cinematically striking with a sheen of fine blonde hairs glittering on the muscular cake of her ass. Her father is a Gay Cuban professor of semiotics at Miami State University. If you’ve ever seen Masculin Feminin, Ev was a swarthy, bowlegged version of Chantal Goya. She preferred neither walking nor standing because she felt less bowlegged athwart a bed and on this bed she plied me with wry tales of her middleaged losers. As she put it she couldn’t get off on one of these fellows until she’d made him cry². Evangeline’s nirvana (her masterpiece) came in Rishikesh where she made a fucking Yogi cry.

But we digress.

Tim lived on the third floor of a mansion-converted-into-a-hippie-flop-house and it was after I moved out of the drop-out commune and into this very mansion that I made Tim’s acquaintance, months before my conversion in the main branch of the public library with him and his Mona Lisa. His cheap room was under the roof so his ceiling was slanted. He shared a toilet with several other tenants down the hall, one of them retarded and the other a daughter of millionaires.

Among the beautiful nightmare characters inhabiting this mansion was a Miltonian poet with a massive upper body and one polio-withered (though shapely as a young girl’s) leg who introduced me to Suzanne Verdal (about whom the famous Leonard Cohen song was written), who once tried to seduce me as thanks for a thirty dollar loan she never repayed. She’d visit the mansion on blessed days and dance on the lawn while her fairytale children sat on a low wall eating not oranges from China but apples that came all the way from Washington state as Tim glowered down from his belfry window.

There was this one, small, abstract painting on an easel near Tim’s belfry window and I can see it now as though it were on the screen before me. It was the only actual painting of Tim’s I ever saw. A dull green impasto circle, a thick blue diagonal and a dull red vertical stripe. He worked on and discussed and re-jiggered this painting for as long as I knew him.

How could Tim speak so movingly and with such detailed knowledge of Modigliani, Soutine, Kandinsky and the others and produce one worthless painting? I’m fairly sure it was a worthless painting. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it will make Tim famous in the 23rd century.

Fifteen years ago, I wrote a short story about Tim (who is always “Tim” whenever I write about him, because no other name comes close) called “The Half-Block Coat”. An excerpt I have cleaned up a little because my earlier, stiffer style irritates me:

So Tim bowed at the threshold and shuffled on the blackened mat and crept in, yanking off his cap and rubbing his palms, looking around the little room to see what had changed in the six months or so since he’d been there last. Henry noted that Tim was losing his hair and wisps of it reached longingly after the cap as he pulled it off. Poor Tim. Forty going on sixty. Henry was twenty two.

Tim kept his coats on and Henry knew it was because Tim didn’t want to appear to presume that he had been invited to stay. It was amazing, Henry thought. The less a person has, the more stylized the rituals. Tim had the florid manners of an Archduke. He only relaxed when invited to and when invited to relax he ranted.

In this story, the young protagonist meets a rich, powerful, sexually unsatisfied middleaged woman from the bigtime genuine Aht World called Aria Tanner and deliberately keeps it a secret from his antisocial attitudinal mentor Tim, for fear that Tim will fuck things up.

At the story’s climax, Tim vomits.

²One thing I could never do was picture Tim crying; Evangeline would have met her match in toothless sack-of-bones Art Angel Tim.

4

3′ x 5′, acrylic on canvas

“Also because she actually went around calling herself a post-modernist. No matter where you are, you Don’t Do This.”

-David Foster Wallace, Westward The Course of Empire Takes Its Way

I met Aria Tanner a couple of years after moving out of the hippie mansion, introduced by an ex-girlfriend who was Aria’s stylist at a salon so snobby I always avoided picking her up from work when we were going together. I’d meet her at the corner. Ms. Tanner was in charge of millions of dollars of corporate Art-acquisition budgets. She was friends with Andy Warhol and lived near a lake with her dog and a lawyer boyfriend in a big house full of trendy Art .The ex suggested I show Aria a portfolio of slides of my mediocre paintings and though my stuff was neither neo-expressionist nor faux-naif enough to leave an impression, the nervy cover letter I included with the portfolio exhilirated the rich lady with its jejune panache. Either that or Pola (not her real name) had told Aria how good I had gotten in bed.

I had started off with very poor skills in this department until an art student (an ex; the virgin orphan) I was cheating on Pola with at the time cheated on me in a menage-a-trois with fellow students, two hicks from Northern California, best friends since Sunday school (they kept exchanging the same sandy mustache since forever; I’d go to a party and one would have it and the other wouldn’t; a week later I’d see them walking with glum looks out of a matinee of Liquid Sky with the mustache situation reversed) who were separately and together, I was made to know, savants of the oral mysteries.

Aria gave me a high-paying job writing the artspeak mumbo jumbo for glossy corporate collection catalogues full of A.R. Penck’s stupid stickmen and Sandro Chia’s sickly telephone doodles and Julian Schnabel’s pointless crockery and Chuck Close’s titanic forays into the limitless realm of zero imagination and I quit housepainting for a whole summer and started buying new books and new clothing and feeling animally ambitious in a not very artistic way. I had moved out of the hippie mansion but I still bumped into Tim quite often (at the Artist’s Quarter Jazz cafe, for example, or Whole Foods co-op) and I had to hide any evidence of this wicked new job from Tim whenever we met.

-Where’d you get those new shoes, man?

-I stole them.

-Bullshit. Seriously?

5

5' x 7' acrylic on canvas (detail)-1984

“I made enemies on the East Coast, the West Coast, and in the Middle West.”

-Leonard Michaels

Gods know I knew Tim was hurting for cash. I think he was mowing lawns and leaf-raking and eating on Foodstamps.

I was dating a fresh-from-Paris lesbian fashion model who was the face for a line of cosmetics for rich old women in France (she was 20; they painted her hair white for the photos). She had a psychotic break on Bastille Day.

When the summer job writing copy for the acquisitions catalog dried up I took a bold trip downtown to Aria’s office in its greenglass skyscraper that looked like a shelf system for kitsch-addicted demigods. I saw this quest as a test of my testicular puissance but the distance from the elevator to the white plush spot in front of the desk of Aria’s secretary came very close to being asymptotically infinite. I’d walk half the distance, then half the remaining distance, then half of that, and so on.

When I finally made it into Aria’s black leather and chrome office, I can’t remember what I said; from where exactly I summoned the sauce to frame the proposal that she should think of some way to continue, despite the summer job’s end, funneling that good, good money towards me. There she sat behind her bunker of a desk in her pinstriped shoulder-padded business suit. She had the pretty, cow-eyed face and the spray-stiff coin-blonde hair and a witty-mean mouth any starving Artist with a molecule of common sense would have poked stuff into. One could tell, even in their armor, that her bosoms looked nothing like my father’s lyrical left tits or even Layla’s. They were triumphalist corporate ultra-mams.

k-breast

I don’t remember how soon after that it was that Aria wrote me the first big for-nothing-in-particular cheque but I remember exactly what I did with it (along with the cash she’d given me for a taxi, which I pocketed by walking eight miles home): I bought my ravishing then-girlfriend a coat. The money flowed for quite a while. Imagine what her lawyer boyfriend (a dedicated jogger) thought of it all. I realize now that he deserved to claw at his hair near the lake alone and suffer a little over how wunderbar he imagined my youthful genitals might be.

Aria wanted to fly me to New York. She wanted to introduce me to her friend Andy Warhol. She wanted to fly me to Europe. She asked me for a backrub in a taxi once. She said with this new thing called H.I.V. flying around she’d never in a million years submit to anal sex… as if I had asked her to.

n-breast

I see myself in Aria’s CEOish living room in that big house near the lake. I’m leafing through a coffeetablebook heavy as a Swiss toddler and fat with Modigliani nudes (and necrotic photographs of the whorish models he fucked before, during and after painting them) whilst Aria takes a shower (under what pretext?) upstairs. I turn to the page featuring my favorite (Reclining Nude… but they’re all called that, aren’t they?) and suddenly I hear the second floor master bathroom door swoosh open (in a sort of now-or-never way, but perhaps I’m reading into the sound of it, retrointuitively) and the hot rush and thunder of her highpressure yuppie shower and Aria calling out that she wants me to come upstairs because she needs to ask me something.

w-breast

Tim never taught me an actual painting technique. He taught me that Art is a voice in the Artist’s head. The voice may change over the years but what doesn’t change is that no one else can hear it. And that your transformation as an Artist is complete when you can’t hear anything but that voice. That’s the point that Tim had reached: I knew that. Did I want to reach that point? I wasn’t sure.

All I knew for sure was that I didn’t want to deal with Aria Tanner nude and wet or just nude or just wet so that was the end of my career in painting, though not in Art.

Somewhere on the planet a Philistine is reading this piece with gratitude and wonder.

Saint Tim shortly after drawing the Mona Lisa

April 17, 2009 – 3:55 pm Categories: every word true, meme noire, vanities and veritas | Post a comment

Tagged anal, Andy Warhol, AR Penck, Bauhaus, cannibals, Derek and the Dominoes, French cosmetics, Harun Farocki, Julian Schnabel, Karen Carpenter, lyrical left tits, money, penis, psychotic breaks, Sandro Chia, The Psychedelic Furs, vagina, virgin orphans |

POOETREE

Ron Silliman is bashing Andrew Motion again. Although, think: it’s funny how little essential difference there is between what many of us can agree is erection-obliteratingly crappy verse and the stuff Silliman obviously considers good (eg, the verse of Ron Silliman). Silliman drubs the following hackneyed passage, from Motion, for being what it is:

Earth’s axel creaks; the year jolts on; the trees
begin to slip their brittle leaves, their flakesof rust
and darkness takes the edge off daylight, not
because it wants to – never that. Because it must.

… while failing to mention that he, Ron Silliman, is guilty of having written the following, so boldly hackneyed in its own standard crypto-narcisso, incest-enfeebled POOETREE way:

from NON

For Jackson Mac Low

Proto-mallie: the flaneur.
“The older I get the more
floors I discover
at Macys.” Little red
thermos looks like
fire extinguisher. Ants won’t cross
trail of
petroleum jelly. Hat
with no bill, cubist
leather beret.
Sore on my tongue, smell
of dung. Voice’s choices
sight’s relight. In gaol
they make you surrender
your panty hose
to prevent suicide.
The crowd of protesters
approach, chanting
“out of the boutiques
and into the streets.”
Seagull brushes
up against my cap.
Rude Work Ahead.
Velcro strap,
reusable cast.
Dog’s name
is Cutty.
Eco-Brutalism, Deep
Semiology. Sturgeon
General. Boot failure!
Odd trim
of the ear’s rim.
The neck seen as a tube is
seen incorrectly.
Post-its peeking
from a three-ring binder.
Dog snarls
behind window of
locked Rabbit.
Morning’s magic means
make my
daily bread. Ears
put head in
brackets. Hypervariables
in DNA show up
on screen like
Bar code
on a cereal box.
Rushed writing.
one is to words
always an outsider,
tho they invade your head,
colonize dreams.
Neither an Aram
nor Omar be.
Picking your teeth versus
picking your nose. Voice
echoes up the lightwell.
Reading to discern liquids
from the bottoms of used cups.
Place mats
map the table.
De Man who shot liberty: valence.
Blue sparks fly
in the dark tunnel
beneath the train’s wheels.
The sound of an egg cracking
against the bowl’s edge.
All sirens are narrative.
The brothers hover in the doorway
smokin’ their crack♣.
Powdery sugar
atop apple pancake.
Now that we have computers
liquid paper is doomed.
Pair of grackles
attempt to mate
perched atop
Amtrak arrow logo
till the she-male
jumps into flight.
Water fountain’s
cooling motor
hums on.
An odd john;
high urinals
and low basins
hard to tell apart.
Thimbalism. “JWs,”
he sniffed and sniffed he did,
“black Mormons.” yellow stone house
across the way, in which lives
Mrs. Florence Schneider
amid her treasures, rare china,
fine handspun cotton, a garden
of grape hyacinth–that odd
blue purple. Dump truck
pale blue filled with clay
atop which lays a shovel.
Black lores of the red cardinal.
Rounded shovel
is for cutting into
the earth, square ones
for piling it away.
Combination of
the swing and these
new reading glasses
quickly makes me seasick.
Back panel of greeting cards.

This POOUHM is beyond parody, no? An accurate parodist would only end up producing roughly the same and scoring a spot in the TPA (Thousand-Page Anthology) right next to Ron’s. One of the defining strictures of the Ahtform is concision, but meaning becomes imaginary (ie, a wholly reader-added value) under a crucial cut-off point having something to do with the author’s genuine will (or ability) to communicate. For example: reducing a sentence such as “the cat shat on the tea tray” to the lapidary Wiccan monosyllable “cat” might magnify the aura of allusion, while eroding the actual meaning to nil, but the temptation to do so, for most POOETS, would be pen-rendingly tough to beat back.

-At roughly the hundreth line of the POOUHM we find: Black lores of the red cardinal, for instance. This line is only required to appear to mean/evoke/deconstruct or adumbrate anything for as long as it takes for the eye to skip over it; it’s not even a gratuitous description because it does not describe: all it really does is mention something. In POOETREE, mentioning is all. (Try mentioning grackles the next time you write a POOUHM… it always works. Esp. good as a HAIKU’S title or in a CONCRETE POOUHM shaped like grackles).

♣-The brothers hover in the doorway smokin’ their crack is only required to seem hip/inclusive/ funny until it reveals itself to be a lame old honkie maneuver in the manner of the Coonshow crap Ray Carver often resorted to in order to borrow depth from the pit of his racism.

Etc.

If any AHTFORM cries out for the mercy of a less lingering, foot-dragging (no pun intended) extinction, it’s POOETREE. Just like Jazz (to which it is often linked by a genealogy of Cold War cliches), POOETREE is only any good, any more, when it comes to us as a mocking gift from the dead. In the so-called West, I mean.

Are certain AHTFORMS era-contingent? Appears so. Think back to when Pottery (a near-anagram) was King. It once seemed inevitable that even working class men would have no choice but to own kilns. Yet, one sweet morning we all woke up from the nightmare and this threat, like the draft (coterminally, in fact?), was over.

Think of it: just as cinema audiences once busted guts laughing at the spectacle of Charlie Chaplin rolling in doubletime down a hill, matrons once flushed (right hands pressed demurely to substantial satin bosoms) while reading The Wasteland.

A year or two ago I wrote a string of “poems” to supplement a chain of linked stories on a specific topic (Berlin) and despite the fact that I steered phobically clear of the twee, self-obsessed and uselessly obscure, it struck me, upon completion of the task, that in writing “poems” at all I might as well be bringing an acoustic guitar to a dinner party in case a jam session breaks out after dessert.

Aye, but: any of these futile “poems” of mine (image-rich, kinky, and demanding just enough Google to make them interesting) would shoot, stuff, mount and consign to the garage any particular thing in Silliman’s longevity-bloated oeuvre. Which is not to say I’m a great POOET; it’s to say I’m not, but I’m better at it than the soi-disant POOETREE CZAR Ron Silliman. (File this paragraph under DRIVEN TO TACKY BRAGGADOCIO BY EXASPERATION. All hate letters will be published without editorial comment or editing.)

A “poem” from the mentioned series of mine:

Malena’s Good Luck New Year’s Rabbit Stew

12:35h

-Cada uno lleva su cruz-

skinning the rabbit, ted inverts
the inverted glove until the long
hand of muscle falls from its grip
of loose blood, clutching the grin
of this morning’s funniest
execution. slain by the sling ted’d made
of malena’s old hose, the bunny tumbled
with its fate-stone thrown
clear through dark bush to
headlighted street, ted waving
traffic to a halt to retrieve it
by deafwarm ears to malena
and dante’s cheering as for
a goal. the dawn dome
of planetarium rose
to a glow by sun’s flush
hole as they bore the corpse
like some world-leader with
eyes struck open
home.

ted knifes the belly, scoops
its coils and jellies in a system
to the sink, the other two toasting
long life/short death as ted
decouples the head’s last
permanent
link. dante jumps

(he will always claim)
(the thing)
(blinked)

the candled air of the whole long flat
rubs the windows with its sweat:
ginger, clove and cardomon escaping the pot
towards the black rhyme of ted and malena’s hair
ted’s elbows on the table and dante’s perplexing
stare in the ruby swirl of wine malena’s got
she tells of the trouble with men and dante says
we know a willing lesbian
she shakes her head: i need something i can sink
these teeth into (with a wink)
hefting her breasts in the low-cut dress she jokes
what about these? don’t you ever miss them
on a winter’s night?
dante frowns i swear i even eschewed huge dugs as a whelp
i would not suck at mother’s milk
and father’s mams were black with glossy felt, he giggles
at ted who growls: not while i’m eating
malena says Cocho kept peacocks when i was thirteen
they would not breed, which made them twice
precious, bleating in the courtyard even earlier
than those ugly cocks, casting spectacular shadows like
beardsley engravings on the opaline gravel around
the villa, occasional prey to a fox our indian shot
presenting it to mother who wore it
to the opera like a (draining her wineglass)
(with seductive indolence)
queen

driven by the spirit of the rabbit or by
the devil possessed, ted proposes a
contest: whoever kisses best
will follow ted to bed whilst the other
does dishes. dante hisses
you bitches and kisses
malena on the mouth, vomitting
chilean flags and
passing
out

My excuse being that I never expect respect or pussy or cash for it. I made it, it’s there; I moved on. Shouldn’t that be on every POOET’S lapel/letterhead/headstone? If it were, I might begin to like them. I might even buy one lunch.

-I made it, it’s there; I moved on.™

To wrap now with another POOUHM of Silliman’s. Any number (ten Haverfords worth?) of beret-wearing sophomores have approximated this POOUHM, over the years, with slightly worse, or slightly better, results.

the nose of kim darby’s double

Canyons, paths
dug thru the snow
Tunnels
the walls as high as
shoulders
The weight of it
heavier
when it begins to melt
& then, at sunset
still midafternoon
the temperature drops
wind over the ridge
so that by dawn
each surface
hardens into ice

Dams clog the drains
to turn the window
facing north
into a waterfall . . .

Driving north
past the mall turn, King
of Prussia, past Bridgeport
and the narrow brick streets of Norr’stown
the road eases up, what
was once country
into a more purely rural
suburbiana (golf course
blanketed in white

A gas station that has not yet
turned into a minmart

Swath cut
by the powerlines
right thru the old quarry, the pit
filled with water
is called a lake, each
new townhouse with its private dock
tho if you look upstairs
you will discover the doors to the closets
all made of vinyl

Someone in another room is singing the alphabet

Barely visible in the high slush
fog mixed with rain
a woman waits for her bus

The form of the flower
exfoliating
petals dropping away
to reveal a new, further flower
now red, now blue
each shape a perpetual
revision, this
leaf thick and milky, this
spiky, hard, this
covered with the finest fuzz
blossoms

In his dream the boy
has dug a maze through the snow
complex, magnificent
that his parents want to dig up
(At four, to identify
the tension of generations

Glow threading
thru the woods at night,
headlights from an auto

Gamuk is kissing Ganuganuga

Resolution protocol:
song of a dot matrix printer

Casting text
across the listserv,
I write
until the first sight of sun
triggers morning’s hunger,
voices echo elsewhere in the house

Stool
in the form of
a sheep, black,
Dinosaur constructed
from wire and beads

A pennywhistle lies on the rug

Thru the poplars
just enough light
to cast the first silhouette.

A pennywhistle, a rug. The self-obsessed author of this vertical typography thought that by merely being touched by his magical mind, the banal substance of the material would transmute into beauty, feeling, meaning.

No.

POOETREE is the pyramid scheme of modern Belles-Lettres. Silliman has thousands of readers who only read him because they want to become Sillimans; does anyone who doesn’t have a manuscript of Silliman-like vertical typography to hawk… read Silliman? As with all Ponzi cons, the trick is getting in early.

You did not get in early.

Buy a kiln.

March 9, 2009 – 2:06 am Categories: critiquing critiquers, disinterested score-settling | Post a comment

Tagged andrew motion, charlie chaplin, crack, grackles, henry gibson, ray carver, ron silliman, t.s. eliot, tacky braggadocio |

On Violence

I recently participated in a blog thread discussion about filmic violence (over at Ed Champion’s place) which, you’ll see, speaks for itself:

20 Responses to “Review: Donkey Punch (2008)”

Steven Augustine on January 23rd, 2009 7:59 pm

Ed, I don’t buy it. I don’t buy it at all. Gaspar Noe raped his audience as a supposed comment on rape (while being, in the process, *so* controversy-courtingly violent that his career arc bulged… a win-win move). Irreversible improved *not one jot* on films such as La Strada or Raging Bull or Nothing But A Man or even Lord of the Effing Flies as meditations on the atavism of modern man.

I walked out of Irreversible before Bellucci’s big scene, but any kid on Limewire, that year, knows that that very excerpt was one of the hottest downloads of the season. That’s the highest compliment for a film of that nature, isn’t it? A few million adolescents wallpapering their libidos with Noe’s “statement”.

And any “adult” audience that *needs* a blood-sopping, 9 minute rape, or to see a CGI skull bashed in with a fire extinguisher, in order to “get” the message (what was the message again? that ultra-violence puts asses on cinema seats?) is surely beyond redemption. Why not an anti-child-abuse flick with name actors and topshelf cinematography/FX featuring (as its 9 minute viral setpiece) a newborn boiled alive?

It’s a question of calibration; of scale: in a film with no crushed brainpans or unzippered guts or geysers of plasma on display, great acting and mercilessly on-target *dialogue* is all the violence a *sensitive, intelligent* audience needs in order to be shocked, still, or haunted, an hour after leaving the theater. Dogville was fairly upsetting; it made a fairly strong point, as I recall; would the film have been “harder hitting” if Kidman’s character had been stomped to a quivering mess during the rape?

Ed: connect the dots: Irreversible and 29 Palms (and the other slick yuppie “Art House” splatter films of the era whose titles I forget) aren’t a prophylaxis against future Abu Ghraibs, they help to lay the foundation for them.

Gaspar Noe, is, in my sincere opinion, a careerist hypocrite with a lot to answer for. Noe and Tarrantino both.

Seriously: go see Nothing But a Man (again). It shows up crap like Irreversible for the soul-leatherizing porn with CGItis that it really is. And “Donkey Punch”… sigh.
JR on January 24th, 2009 1:26 pm

“Irreversible and 29 Palms (and the other slick yuppie “Art House” splatter films of the era whose titles I forget) aren’t a prophylaxis against future Abu Ghraibs, they help to lay the foundation for them.”

I didn’t know movies were supposed to act as a cure-all for what ails man. That’s news to me.
Steven Augustine on January 24th, 2009 1:55 pm

JR, read the comment carefully and take the time to absorb the argument (a dictionary might help; look up “prophylaxis”, which you seem to think shares a definiton with “panacea”) before breaking out the sarcasm, please.

I’d appreciate a response to my actual point (ie, the hypocrisy of making a nauseatingly violent film as a supposed response to the problem of violence, which was Noe’s stated purpose).

I put it you that Noe doesn’t take the possible *effect of the violence in his own movie* as seriously as I (and a few others) do. Here are a few questions and answers from an interview Noe did about the movie:

Q: There was a moment after the rape and before the beating when Monica’s character could have run away.

A: No, I don’t think so. I think he would have run after her.

Q: Of course, the rapist is Jo Prestia, the professional boxer from France.

A: He used to be the world champion Thai kickboxer. He’s very, very famous in France. Some people would come to the set and would be more impressed with his presence than the actors.

Q: What did he do to prepare for the rape scene?

A: None of us rehearsed anything aside from the kicking of [Monica's] head in [the rape] scene, and the [revenge] scene [with the] fire extinguisher. And we didn’t rehearse the whole scenes, just those parts. We had to do tests before to make sure the actors would not be really hit. For the rest, we just went on the set and shot them six times over three days.

Q: How did you simulate the rape scene?

A: One aspect of the digital editing makes it seem realistic — his penis is added after the shoot. His fly was actually zipped in the scene. It makes the whole thing much more realistic. With his penis visible, Monica loved it. But you don’t expect that, and that particular detail makes the thing more dramatic.

Q: Do you really believe, as the first line says, that “time destroys all things?”

A: It’s very dramatic and it sounds good. There are two translations, and the original sentence in French is “time devours all things.” It’s a well-known Latin sentence, and I almost used that sentence, but it might have been too intellectual. I do believe it. Everything that happens is born inside time — so you can also put it the other way around.

Q: But the counterpoint to that is the really nonjudgmental comment that follows: “There are no bad deeds, just deeds.” Can you comment?

A: The guy talking is a good friend of mine, very bright. He changed his language for each take. That statement was his personal opinion, although I happen to agree.

Q: How do you expect gay groups in America will respond?

A: In France they love the movie. Gay people thought Vincent Cassel was so gorgeous and so sexy. There will always be people saying it’s homophobic. But the reaction of the gay community was better than the straight community. People most offended are really heterosexual men. Male dominants have problems identifying with a woman who’s raped.

Q: Men can get raped, too.

A: The fear disappears with men when you are 18 or 20. I wanted this movie to bring back men’s old fear to show them how it is to be raped. Remember, Vincent’s character almost gets raped, too.

Q: Would the concepts work as well if the characters weren’t so young, beautiful and charmed?

A: Monica and Vincent — playing the happy couple — are the perfect couple for most people. When you see them naked on the bed you think they’re so perfect together. It creates a fascination to see their intimacy, but also a jealousy; you know they will pay for being so young, so pretty and so rich. You cannot hate them, because you know their happiness will not last.

Q: On a lighter note, who came up with the idea of a dress that makes Monica B look like her nipples are constantly erect?

A: We were looking for the sexiest dress we could find for her. The best, most beautiful party dress we could find that would be something you could really wear in Paris. She had her own green silk dress, and then this guy from Yves Saint Laurent came in and redesigned the whole thing (replicated). We needed 10 copies of that dress, because during the rape scene, after each take, it would be destroyed by blood, etc. It was designed right on her breast. It fits her perfectly.

Q: When you watch your own movie, can you understand why people walk out?

A: When I see [the two violent] scenes, I see only special effects. But the ending gets me — I cannot see the kids [on the grass in the park]. I walk out one minute before the end because I feel like I’m going to cry. And it’s not because of the [scene], but because of the music, Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 7.”
ed on January 24th, 2009 4:36 pm

You’re assuming, Steven, that filmmakers are trying to solve violence with these films. That there is an underlying “message” to be had behind the results, rather than an exploration. I reject that notion, for we then enter into the regrettable territory of dogma (but not necessarily post-Dogme). I think Noe was, in the above interview, trying to get a rise out of anyone reading it by suggesting that “Monica loved it.” He tends to talk a lot of shit. I don’t know if Roth would make a similar claim to defend the Matarazzo rape scene. Both, of course, wish to present themselves as provocateurs.

But it is the films that matter most. IRREVERSIBLE’s violence is defensible, because we are presented with the happy couple at “the beginning.” We at least get a sense, psychologically speaking, of what the characters are capable of and how the violence may be there within the “happy couple” makeup. But with Roth, we don’t get that chance at all with Matarazzo’s character. Aside from a mild dis to her two friends, she’s presented as a cartoon and is never given a chance to be real or present another side to this cartoonish template. She’s mocked for being geeky, for being earnest and inquisitive, for feeling, for having emotional moments in her diary. And she is punished with this despicable and defenseless scene, which does nothing to further our understanding of violence and torture in the way that Noe does.

Violence and rape, unpleasant as they are, are realities. There are many ways to go about including them in film. And exploitation films have the potential to pursue these realities — as Ferrara does extremely well — in a way that causes us to frame explicit and uncomfortable scenes within the darker side of the human repertoire. But it needs to be presented WITH the repertoire in order to be justifiable. This can make for an unpleasant moviegoing experience, but then I happen to think that investigating the unpleasant is vital for any art form.

Lay the foundation? You can’t be serious.
Steven Augustine on January 24th, 2009 5:07 pm

“Lay the foundation? You can’t be serious.”

I’m extremely serious, Ed. But before I get to that, I’d like to get to this:

“…And she is punished with this despicable and defenseless scene, which does nothing to further our understanding of violence and torture in the way that Noe does.”

Ed, exactly how does Noe’s graphic, 9-minute rape scene “further” your understanding of violence and torture? Are you claiming that you were sitting on the fence on these subjects before Noe opened your eyes? Are you claiming that you didn’t really know that a woman could be raped and beaten into an irreversible coma before seeing the process, in explicit detail, as presented in a film?
JR on January 24th, 2009 5:25 pm

I wonder what movies Torquemada watched before he burned all of those heretics at the stake.
Steven Augustine on January 24th, 2009 5:36 pm

JR:

Resort to all the logical fallacies you like (influence A postdates behaviour X, is therefore irrelevant to behaviour B?); they won’t quite stand in lieu of a pertinent response.

To save you the trouble of actually reading my first comment: I’m calling Gaspar Noe a hypocrite for claiming to address the matters of violence and rape in his film Irreversible. Any response specific to that… ?
JoeBu on January 24th, 2009 5:41 pm

While I tend to agree with the general attitude of SA with regards to this, if I may throw a bit into the discussion:

First, I may be the only person in the world who feels this way, but the longer the scene went on (only saw the film once, in theater), the LESS disturbing I found it (still disturbing though; I’m not a sicko). In other words, for one viewer, extended exposure to the graphic attack had the result of desensitizing that viewer to the brutality onscreen. Regardless of Noe’s perhaps various intended effects, I’m guessing this was not one of them. (On the other hand, I found the fire extinguisher scene to be infinitely more disturbing, and I don’t think identification or a lack of it had anything to do with this difference.)

Secondly, and I mean this in all earnestness, no snarkiness, how exactly does an extended graphic rape by one character inform/relate to the idea that “…Noé is interested in suggesting to the filmgoer that our quotidian gestures may very well be laced with savagery.”? I mean, if I’m writing a treatise on violence, then have scene where some random person commits an act of violence, while both my treatise and the scene are “about” violence, it doesn’t necessarily make them related or one relevant to the other.

Despite my general misgivings about “Irreversible,” I’m willing to give you (or anyone) the benefit of the doubt regarding its worth, but I’m not seeing it. And, if SA suggested above, Noe is attempting to have it both ways so to speak, in my mind he’s failed at the one way so as to leave us with the other. He’s attempted a trick with a extremely high degree of difficulty, and in flubbing it, ended with a horrible crash.
JR on January 24th, 2009 5:51 pm

Yeah. He’s a hypocrite. So what? He’s also an incredible filmmaker. I can watch a movie and appreciate the techniques used to create a response. It’s one of the joys of great filmmaking. Apparently you have a hard time with this. Maybe you should stick to feel good movies and then you won’t feel bad. Hotel for Dogs came out this weekend.

And I did look up prophylaxis in the dictionary. And in my dictionary, one of the alternate definitions was “self-righteous asshat.”
Steven Augustine on January 24th, 2009 6:29 pm

Great, JR! Are you, um, done now?

To Joe:

“In other words, for one viewer, extended exposure to the graphic attack had the result of desensitizing that viewer to the brutality onscreen.”

Well, exactly. Question being: do humans pay a price for adjustments like these (which are near-constant, now)? Don’t laugh if I use the word “innocence” here, but is Noe robbing the viewer, nauseated by *his* violence, of a particle of innocence… only to replace it with what? “Understanding”? I don’t think so.

I’m not presenting a case for censorship, mind you. I’m merely exercising my prerogative to call “bullshit” when I see it.
Miracle Jones on January 24th, 2009 7:09 pm

Until a beautiful Italian woman gets graphically raped by a swan on film, I’ll save my money for literature, where the real action is.

Hostel. Pish posh pshaw. Sounds like the plot of a Roald Dahl story that he wrote and then tossed in the fire out of boredom with himself.
JoeBu on January 24th, 2009 7:51 pm

I should add, for Stephen or anyone else, that I’m not making the “violence desensitizes ergo bad” argument, and that I agree with Ed’s ideas regarding “exploring” difficult ideas. Some of my favorite films/filmmakers are notoriously violent (not that the violence is why I like them; I’m thinking Kubrick and Peckinpah). I’d contrast Noe’s film with “Salo,” a film I found extremely disturbing and yet, after recovering, consider a masterpiece, certainly technically, albeit a difficult one.

I’ll also add that I look forward to seeing Noe’s previous (to “Irreversible”) film, the name of which escapes me, apparently very violent as well. Jonathan Rosenbaum, formerly of the Chicago Reader, found the previous to be truly a masterpiece; he subsequently found “Irreversible” to be reprehensible. I recall finding one or the other review (or both) very interesting, and despite my bad experience, I’m still willing to watch Noe.
Steven Augustine on January 24th, 2009 8:35 pm

“I should add, for Stephen or anyone else, that I’m not making the ‘violence desensitizes ergo bad’ argument, and that I agree with Ed’s ideas regarding ‘exploring’ difficult ideas.”

Sure, Joe, but, again: it’s a question of scale: I want to know if Ed thinks that Noe’s strategy of ramping the level of graphic violence to *that* level accomplishes more in an “exploration” of violence than “Raging Bull” does.

On a purely formal level, I’d ask what this “exploration” entails; frankly, I think that’s a convenient, apologist trope we’ve been given by filmmakers (and their distributors) who want to have their cake (go as far as possible and sell as many tickets as possible) and eat it too (justify the results as edifying). I also think we’re handling lots of other unexamined concepts here, not the least of which being the concept of the “Auteur” as applied to hundreds of directors.

Now, I’ve watched Irreversible at home (skipping the rape scene), and besides the borrowed (from Memento) trick of reverse-chronology, the only truly stand-out things about the film are the violent setpieces, which are stand-out for *technological* reasons. As a drama, Irreversible is mediocre; the acting is solid-if-unremarkable; script largely improvised; Bellucci’s beauty is a big part of the movie’s lure. What’s left, minus Bellucci’s beauty, Memento’s structure and the shocking CGI? I can see the craft there (the sum total of scores of professionals at work); where’s the Art?

Are we confusing the seductive power of ultra-slick surfaces with Art?

And the “de-sensitizing” effect can concern us on an Aesthetic level (if it’s too unhip to worry about it on a social level), if we can no longer respond, for example, to the grief/betrayal/animal-will-to-live on Giulietta Masina’s face at the end of The Nights of Cabiria simply because we’re used to the knobs being turned to ELEVEN and she isn’t being decapitated.

I’m arguing that ART is a matter of finely calibrated values and materials and the creepy CGI bombast of Noe’s torture porn in Irreversible has a nuance-obliterating effect. Plus a hook we’d rather not name: a lot of people *enjoy* watching depictions of torture.
Steven Augustine on January 24th, 2009 9:05 pm

Also at Joe:

“I’d contrast Noe’s film with ‘Salo,’ a film I found extremely disturbing and yet, after recovering, consider a masterpiece, certainly technically, albeit a difficult one.”

A contrast we can and should make point by point, I think. I have to get to bed (it’s 2 am here), but I’d like to discuss Salo tomorrow, if Ed is game…
Jeremy Richards on January 27th, 2009 1:41 pm

Hey Steven, since you aren’t brave enough to turn on the comments section of your blog, I thought I would come here and tell you that you’re a much better film critic than you are a writer of fiction, but I suspect you already know that. Figures. Now your patronizing tone and supercilious attitude makes perfect sense.
Steven Augustine on January 27th, 2009 3:27 pm

JR:

It took you *three whole days* to come up with *that*? Laugh.

My comments are off because of angry (and only technically literate) little creatures like you, darling. Don’t be disappointed if your opinion doesn’t mean much to me. Ditto for your equals (for they are legion).

Love,

SA
Eli Roth – Continued « Geranium Kisses on January 27th, 2009 5:11 pm

[...] Champion serendipitously was exploring similar terrain to yours truly on Friday. In the context of thoughtfully attacking Donkey Punch, a new movie, Champion explores the justifications for ultra-violence in movies. In considering [...]
Steven Augustine on January 27th, 2009 5:15 pm

Actually, JR: you’ve given me a pretty good idea. Anyone who wants to send HATE MAIL to the address provided on my ABOUT page will see it published, *unedited* and *without comment* (no matter how ugly/cruel/accurate or profanity-rank), on a new page I’ll link to (prominently) from my main fiction page.

So, no more excuses if you feel the hate and you really, really want to express it!

Isn’t that egalitarian?

I’ll bet you feel better already.
JR on January 29th, 2009 6:41 pm

You got a big mouth, faggot. Talk like this to me while I’m standing face to face with you and I would smack you across your face. Why don’t you tell me where you live so I can come and show you what a little pussy you are. Watch what you say to people you prick. One of these days you’re going to confuse yourself and forget that you’re not hidden behind your computer screen and someone is going to shove their fucking fist down your throat.
DrMabuse on January 29th, 2009 7:59 pm

Alright. I’m closing this thread. This is not a place for people to threaten each other. It’s a place to carry on a civil discussion.

January 30, 2009 – 6:16 pm Categories: Satire hot or Cold | Comments (1)

Tagged ed champion, eli roth, gasper noe, torture porn zeitgeist politics |

Why Famous Writers Should Never Self-Google

or: adventures in the compulsively mediated, PC prison of totalitarian decorum

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/jan/26/sebald-hughes-and-smith-three-modern-greats?showallcomments=true&commentpage=2&commentposted=1

Unlike Zadie Smith¹, I really was just “passing through the book pages” (of the Guardian’s blog section) yesterday. What I found was a blog article, by Robert McCrum, titled Sebald, Hughes and Smith: three modern greats. I sneered, of course, but it was a sneer devoid of passion. Not that the picture posted under the blog heading, of Zadie Smith, looking measurably less ugly than J.L. Borges, wasn’t nice. It was nice. Not (for me) write-a-hyperbolic-headline-about-her nice, but nice enough.

I scanned the comment thread and came to something by the writer Oscar MacSweeny. His comment (now deleted) was something to the effect that McCrum’s calling Zadie Smith a “modern great” was beyond the pale unless McCrum was “screwing her”, in which case the hyperbole would be understandable. To which I chipped in with the fatal qualifier (now semi-deleted), “…or would like to,” along with a sarcastic bit about some other commenter’s notion that Sebald is “boring” and Hughes is unread “outside the English language” (and therefore of no consequence), though Zadie is tops.

One incisive participant, a thing called “Greenball”, who then got the coveted pat-on-the-head from a tetchy Guardian Unlimited functionary who wields her modicum of power firmly, wrote:

“And shame on Steven Augustine for writing such offensive things. And shame on Oscar. You small pathetic men. I think it’s outrageous that the Guardian allow this kind of personal abuse in the name of journalism.”

Is a personal opinion “journalism”? Are comment threads comprised of “journalism” or personal opinion? Are all personal opinions, by decree, to be for the “good” things and against the “bad” things consensus decides?

Was Oscar’s comment, accusing McCrum of positive sexism (or Luvism), a form of negative sexism? Only if said comment could only have been used “against” a particular gender. Was my addition, a comment on the possible spot where Robert McCrum’s possible libido intersects with his possible literary judgment, negative sexism? Again: only if I couldn’t (or wouldn’t) have quipped exactly the same way about some blogger’s hyperbolic estimation of the value of Jonathan Franzen’s oeuvre.

I mention Franzen because of the controversy I remember about the glamour photo his publisher used for the jacket of early printings of The Corrections. The photo was a sexed-up (photoshopped?) confection that made Franzen look not just better than he had ever appeared to in real life (presumably), but better than most actors depicting crusading hot lawyers on primetime American television. The complaint (but why complain?) being that the book’s rapturous reception was, in large part, extra-literary. Imputations of wave upon wave of fainting Franzenmaniacs at book-signings and so forth.

Clearly, a subtle sub-theme of this longish comment of mine is the Faustian pact that younger, cuter writers enter into with the Beelzebuboid PR wings of their publishers, though the logical conclusions of that implied essay (about petards and elevation) are too obvious to belabor here. So, back to my plea to famous writers (who, surely, are compensated in advance for the pain) to either, A) resist the self-Google demon or B) respond not snippily to what they subsequently find…

Mr. Franzen has taken quite a “beating”, in the years since that photo flap faded, from “print” and “blog” critics alike. The criticisms are sometimes expressed with immoderate diction, as private opinions often are and public opinions sometimes are and political and/or corporate speech is very, very rarely. An important question emerges: is there a place for immoderate diction in this world?

Sarah Crown, some kind of higher functionary of the GU’s online business (the business of generating web traffic, no matter the content), claims not. She writes (emphasis mine):

“I’ll certainly be asking the moderators to remove the remarks from MrStevenAugustine and iamoscarmacsweeny. Absolutely no place for them on here (or anywhere, for that matter). Sorry they weren’t spotted sooner.”

So, now we know: there’s no place on Earth, and no possible situation, in which it’s proper to imply (or opine outright) that X commenter adores Y writer for any other than literary reasons. Especially if the extra-literary reasons are romantic/sexual and the adored writer is a woman. Because placing a woman’s name in a sentence or paragraph that also contains a reference to sex, no matter the gist of the sentence, is “sexist”, by default? One supposes. Here’s an experiment:

“Robert McCrum, ranking Jonathan Franzen’s work on a level with Rod McKuen’s and Robert Ludlum’s is only forgivable if you’re screwing him (or them)!”

Is that better? It feels less “sexist”. But it’s still immoderate diction. The question remains: is banning immoderate diction a triumph of PC culture (that high-strung web of proscription and taboo, thickened and thriving during an arguably illiberal, anti-intellectual, crypto-fascist convulsion of the “West”)? Immoderate diction is banned unless the “good” are using it, of course: I’m quite sure it’s okay to refer to Oscar and me as “louts” and “idiots” and “bedwetters” and “small pathetic men”. I’ve just checked the etiquette book and it says, on page one, that it is².

Even Zadie Smith, having stumbled upon Oscar MacSweeny’s personal (if indirect) opinion of her work’s merit (and my quip appended to Oscar’s opinion), did not like it. She wrote, among other things (emphasis mine):

¹Hello. This is zadie smith. I know this is pointless, but I was just passing through the book pages, and found this thread and wanted to add two things…

(etc., etc., until)

3. Oscar and Steve Augustine: everyone is free to dislike whichever book they dislike. But read what you’ve written, below, again. Is this what women novelists are to expect? Would any male writer, no matter how poor a writer, be spoken of like this?

“MrStevenAugustine
26 Jan 09, 9:03pm (about 7 hours ago)

Oscar:

“…unless you’re screwing her.”

Or would like to?”

This question prefacing Oscar MacSweeny’s/Steven Augustine’s evil work (Would any male writer, no matter how poor a writer, be spoken of like this?) is rhetorical. But what if the answer is “yes”?

As it turns out, that’s exactly what the answer is.

Which would mean that Zadie Smith’s wounded sanctimony, while still humanly reasonable, is rhetorically invalidated. The only fair thing from Zadie Smith, Sarah Crown and the hysterical bluenoses who enliven the thread with their dimwittish celebrity arse-kissing, at this point, is an apology to Oscar MacSweeny and Steven Augustine… and a generously inscribed copy of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty to both of us.

Actually, forget the book.

²What’s it like being lambasted savagely by a near-idiot not even known to exist before the onslaught? A little like having one’s leg humped by a muddy Spaniel growling fiercely as it humps. Here are my favorite rude comments from the irony-proof decorum-enforcers on that thread:

1. Greenball

27 Jan 09, 1:58pm

Steven Augustine, your behaviour is truly shocking. You talk about people “screwing”, or wanting to, Miss Smith, and when she rightly expresses offence, you tell her that’s just like Franzen being compared to Svevo. That is so ignorant and aggressive I can scarcely believe it.

Though I just had the misfortune to look at your blog [http://staugustinian.wordpress.com/ ] and I can see why you’d hate Smith. She has talent and success. You have nothing.

Sarah Crown, I see you said 4 hours ago you’d remove the offending posts. I suggest that you do before Miss Smith is sensible enough to contact her lawyers.

McCrumb, let’s indeed get some things straight. You wrote a stupid, ignorant piece in which you dangled Miss Smith over a moat and then pretended to be surprised when the crocodiles began taking pieces out of her. You haven’t the grace to then apologise, but instead grudgingly (even sardonically?) write that obviously, it’s all your fault. Well, yes, it is. It is an exceptionally stupid posting.

2. Naid

27 Jan 09, 2:11pm

McCrum – talk about hanging someone out to dry. Where’s your spine, man?

I like your choice of sebald and hughes. not read smith.

stevenaugustine, you’re a bed wetter of the highest order. if you don’t like something, have the balls to say so. “Gender assymetrical jape” aside (are you a writer? i’d give up. you’re cringeworthy), please spare us all your weasling words, they’re beneath you.

so many nasty snivellers on these pages. guardian readers make me despair..

to be fair, you are doubtless mostly a bunch of sub-editors and blog writers [http://staugustinian.wordpress.com/] suffering rejected articles and novels.. still, no excuse.

3. Bruno62

27 Jan 09, 6:49pm

To MrStevenAugustine

I told you before to stop writing because everything you write is boring and now I see you did not hear my advice [http://staugustinian.wordpress.com/]. How can you be so low to insult the The Most Talented and Gifted Writer Zadie Smith? How many books did you publish and how much money did you earn with them? Zadie Smith, 3 books and literary star, this is too much to your liver, n’est pas? Today, Mr..(you dont deserve too much) Steve, our world became miserable with internet, because when you have no talent at all, you write a blog [http://staugustinian.wordpress.com/] because it seems to ease your resentment and frustation. If you are gentleman, if you are really a british gentleman, you should apologise to Miss Smith. But if you are a member of the Muridae Family, stay in hole. Bruno da Silva, Switzerland

BONUS TRACK (a favorite, astonishingly rational comment of mine, deleted from the thread):

Sarah:

“@StevenAugustine

On the contrary – I’ve reported that comment too. Tut.”

I counted at least five (not the least of which being “bedwetter”… you’d think my wife or 3 year old daughter would’ve told me!). All quips (as dangerous as quips can be) aside: suggestion…leave them *all* as they are because they are merely *opinions* and a comment thread is supposedly comprised of things like that. Even the odd ranklers.

Also:

Alarming, old chum, I disagree with your characterization of Oscar’s original remark (and my quipped addition) as “schoolboy childish”. Anything but, I’d have thought: it’s wee children who think everything is all about white smiles, yellow duckies and chocolate bunnies. Oscar’s (clearly frustrated) remark struck me as that of a cynical adult’s disgust with the world. What’s “childish” about that? I’m hoping there’s room left, in the compulsively mediated, PC prison of totalitarian decorum, for grownups to be frank now and then… even if it makes the bunnies cry.

January 27, 2009 – 2:43 pm Categories: critiquing critiquers, disinterested score-settling, Satire hot or Cold, vanities and veritas | Post a comment

Tagged Greenball, Guardian Unlimited, Hothouse Flower, Jonathan Franzen, Oscar MacSweeny, Robert McCrum, Sarah Crown, Zadie Smith |

A Concerned Reader Writes

children-are-not-the-2

The person who write the website http://staugustinian.wordpress.com/ shoud stop writing.

It’s boring und really a shit. I’d rather read Jonathan Safran Foer.

-Bruno da Silva

December 16, 2008 – 4:52 pm Categories: critiquing critiquers, disinterested score-settling, of interest, vanities and veritas | Comments Off

Kong of Pap:1

Multiple Choice

True or False

Essay Questions

Kong of Pap:2

Folks, I’m goin’ down to St. James Infirmary, See my baby there; She’s stretched out on a long, white table, She’s so sweet, so cold, so fair.

When I went down to Old Joe’s barroom On the corner by the Square The drinks we all served as usual And the usual crowd was there

Up to the bar I saw Big Joe beginning With these eyes bloodshoting red Gather round and now all you seen us I’m gonna tell you just what Big Joe said

Now, when I die, bury me in my straight-leg britches, Put on a box-back coat and a stetson hat, Put a twenty-dollar gold piece on my watch chain, So you can let all the boys know I died standing pat.

An’ give me six crap shooting pall bearers, Let a chorus girl sing me a song. Put a red hot jazz band at the top of my head So we can raise Hallelujah as we go along.

Folks, now that you have heard my story, Say, boy, hand me another shot of that booze; If anyone should ask you, Tell ‘em I’ve got those St. James Infirmary blues.

Well, on my left stood Joe McKennedy And his eyes were bloodshot red. When he told me that sad story, These were the words he said:

I went down to the St. James infirmary, I saw my baby there, She was stretched out on a long white table, So cold, and fine, and fair. Go ahead!

Yes, sixteen coal black horses To pull that rubber tied hack. Well, it’s seventeen miles to the graveyard But my baby’s never comin’ back.

And if anybody should ask you who’s been singing If anybody should wanna know who wrote this song Just tell him Big Joe was here this morning And he was here this morning, yeah, but now he’s gone

“During the civil war, Trotsky wrote a book on art.”

-Harun Farocki, Dog From the Freeway

2

“Wow, obscure terms. English major, are we? But, I couldn’t agree with you more. Thanks. “

-RedWolfSV, from a comment thread about a Kara Walker video¹

“After a lot of years of looking-and-listening, I’ve come to the conclusion that ‘everything’ is a marketing exercise! I think anyone who produces art in any dimension, and says they did it for themselves is a liar. If they did it for themselves, why are they showing it to us???”

¹”Any Black Artist who manages to go beyond the condescended-to level of the kitschly reassuring and second-rate can look forward to vicious attacks… often from other Blacks. Sad but inevitable.Walker’s work is an exquisitely delicate kick in the nuts. You don’t get it. Fine.”

3

“We are each a slimy apparatus of interacting liquids.”

-John Updike, Toward the End of Time

²One thing I could never do was picture Tim crying; Evangeline would have met her match in toothless sack-of-bones Art Angel Tim.

4

“Also because she actually went around calling herself a post-modernist. No matter where you are, you Don’t Do This.”

-David Foster Wallace, Westward The Course of Empire Takes Its Way

5

“I made enemies on the East Coast, the West Coast, and in the Middle West.”

-Leonard Michaels

External Serial Novel

of interest

FRESH TEXT

VAULT

FORMATS

Pages

LEGAL

DISCLAIMER

Follow “VINTAGE AUGUSTINE”

Folks, I’m goin’ down to St. James Infirmary,
See my baby there;
She’s stretched out on a long, white table,
She’s so sweet, so cold, so fair.

When I went down to Old Joe’s barroom
On the corner by the Square
The drinks we all served as usual
And the usual crowd was there

Up to the bar I saw Big Joe beginning
With these eyes bloodshoting red
Gather round and now all you seen us
I’m gonna tell you just what Big Joe said

Now, when I die, bury me in my straight-leg britches,
Put on a box-back coat and a stetson hat,
Put a twenty-dollar gold piece on my watch chain,
So you can let all the boys know I died standing pat.

An’ give me six crap shooting pall bearers,
Let a chorus girl sing me a song.
Put a red hot jazz band at the top of my head
So we can raise Hallelujah as we go along.

Folks, now that you have heard my story,
Say, boy, hand me another shot of that booze;
If anyone should ask you,
Tell ‘em I’ve got those St. James Infirmary blues.

Well, on my left stood Joe McKennedy
And his eyes were bloodshot red.
When he told me that sad story,
These were the words he said:

I went down to the St. James infirmary,
I saw my baby there,
She was stretched out on a long white table,
So cold, and fine, and fair.
Go ahead!

Yes, sixteen coal black horses
To pull that rubber tied hack.
Well, it’s seventeen miles to the graveyard
But my baby’s never comin’ back.

And if anybody should ask you who’s been singing
If anybody should wanna know who wrote this song
Just tell him Big Joe was here this morning
And he was here this morning, yeah, but now he’s gone