In 1984, a year masquerading as a didactic yet prophetic novel, the real person of my father was kicked out of his home by the real person of my mother; I make such differentiation because real life, containing such real people, has no front and back cover, only addendums and epilogues under constant revision, not to mention a disorganized index of horror. My father, whose emotional abuse was verging on physical, recently kicked out after a bad night involving a six-pack of import beer and a kitchen knife, just past 40, rented a room four blocks away in a house he proudly referred to as of “bachelors,” showing me the cool Mazda RX-7 parked in the driveway, whose owner greeted this narrator with a swift “hey” in the manner of a dude out to party who wanted nothing to do with his new 41-year-old roommate and his 8-year-old son engaged in their ongoing “Sunday visits,” whose unnatural allocation was incurred by the former’s domestic transgression.

Tom, I think his name was, loved the Rolling Stones, which I surmised with fingers flipping through a milk crate full of their albums. I was fascinated with Sticky Fingers (1971), designed by Warhol, whose vinyl cover featured an actual zipper one could unzip, peaking through to the image of tight briefs whose main subject (while not consistent in location) was implied by their respective notable mounds. For about a month or two — before my father found his own apartment, then his own country (i.e. the United States, hence my arrival here three years later, my single mother at the edge of her patience, love, and bank account) — he would still receive mail at his home, our home, however confusing the idea of “our” became, giving me the task of walking his mail over to him. I remember how odd it felt becoming the mailman of my family. I’d stay over for fifteen minutes or so, somewhat awkwardly as my father addressed whatever issues the mail incited, at times disturbed phone calls to my mother regarding household bills and other “adult things,” this in the mind of a boy who had no idea how gay it was to be so consumed with opening the fly of an anonymous man with a huge cock.

Warhol’s joke, of course, was fellatio, or just a handjob, if one considers the album’s title. One is met below the belt, on their knees, with a sole zipper to undo. Of subordination. Perhaps his Velvet Undergound & Nico (1967) banana was too obvious or not enough. But this was years before art school, “sophisticated” taste, and Reed and Cale’s alienating distortion which seemed to almost resent being listened to. I went through a Velvet Underground phase, but got tired of the tranquilizer dart effect. The suspicious large mound to the right of the zipper seemed related to what I was discovering about my own body, however tiny in size. I remember Tom smiling at me while I fingered the fly, the secret of adulthood’s primitive mechanisms in the face of childhood’s curiosity. Now when I look at the cover I think of foreskin, smegma, the vas deferens, gay ’70s porn, anal sex, the inevitable $hot’s economics and abstract expressionism, and other wonderful things adults are blessed with knowledge of. I miss nonsex. I miss my small fingers.

I delivered his mail until it stopped coming, as if the purveyors with whom my father was in debt just knew, and went after him elsewhere. My mother and I moved to low-income housing closer to the city, inverse white flight, and the Sunday visits with my father happened less and less, until one day the elevator doors which led to and away from Apt. 404 shut on his tear stricken face. It would be years later until I actually heard the album: the funny racism of “Brown Sugar,” boring misogyny of “Bitch,” and oddly haunting “Moonlight Mile,” though the song not mentioned will soon be so. Tom eventually drove me around the neighborhood in his RX-7, which smelled like perfume, another way of saying smelled like success. I remember being happy for him, and blessing rock and roll. In a bachelors’ house in Markham, Ontario, a small suburb just outside of Toronto, sometime in the evening when the purple sky, battered by the sun, concedes to its bruise; when other fathers and husbands are with their families, I — now, hidden in hindsight — imagine my father, a programmer for IBM who just couldn’t program the rest of his life, carefully guiding the needle to “Wild Horses,” perhaps with a commemorative six-pack next to him, or 8″ chef’s knife, slouching into the opening lines almost perfectly composed on behalf of his small son, who only wished the mail contained better news: childhood living is easy to do / the things you wanted I brought them for you.

1. “The Solo,” James Hetfield

Video still (5:12), Youtube

© 1992 Warner Bros.

James Hetfield is the singer, chief songwriter, and front man of Metallica. He wrote “Nothing Else Matters” and is the predominant figure of not just this video, but all their songs, and their entire ethos. This is fine. It’s consistent with the logic of most bands: a guy drapes chords around a diary entry and finds three other guys to fill in the low and high ends. Traditionally, the guitar solo — appearing at approximately 2/3rds into it, whose melodic evocations serve as a tight stringy emotive refrain — is reserved for the lead guitarist, in our case Kirk Hammett; though, here, James had to not just perform the lead solo, but dedicate its duration to filming the nuances of the various facial expressions which all worked together to corroborate this personal rapture towards his own notes. Kirk Hammett is a very competent guitarist and could have easily done the solo. True, one could argue that James wrote the solo, but that is not the point. The point is James has overstepped the guitar solo boundaries. Every time I watch this part of the video I feel repulsed.

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2. “The Meta-mirror,” Lars Ulrich

Video still (3:14), Youtube

© 1992 Warner Bros.

What makes Lars Ulrich’s douchebagness simply eerie — as compared to those who concede, even relish, to being so e.g. Kanye West, David Lee Roth, Keith Richards — is that he presents himself as a serious, perhaps even moral, figure in the music industry, making the smug douchebagosity that much more uncanny. (Sting, Chris Martin, and Bono also suffer from this; and Beck is headed there.) Here, in an odd Diderotian breaking-of-the-fourth-wall gesture, Lars looks into the camera as if it were a mirror, adjusting his mane with a self-confidence that makes one wonder if he’s aware of how sparse his hairline is. The message seems to say: You’re lucky to have the view of my mirror. You’re lucky we’ve decided to do this “casual b-reel footage” video in which our extreme pedestrian mellowness is an unlikely and refreshing break, being that we are the gods of music.

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3. “Political Photo Op,” Kirk Hammett

Video still (4:08), Youtube

© 1992 Warner Bros.

Metallica’s politics are somewhat vague and contradictory. Metal (as with other subversive-ish genres e.g. punk, goth, and rap) is implicitly “rebellious,” which would logically stand as anti-country or -government; also, they are from the California Bay Area, one of the most liberal places in the Unites States, so one must balance the cloudy lightning-stricken darkness with all this pleasant weather. Much of their motifs (e.g. the Black Album “Don’t Tread on Me” Snake — its flag also seen in said video; “Blitzkrieg,” off Kill ‘Em All, named after Nazi-Germany militia methodology) seem more in collusion with American conservative pro-war reactionaryism. The sausage fest of metal fans comprise of both the most emasculated and homophobic. The camera holds on this shot a little too long, as Kirk Hammett takes a little too much time stuffing what appears to be a $5 dollar bill in a Veteran’s donation box, such that we can clearly see this supportive gesture that reeks of condescension. A five dollar beer will make you feel better, but a five dollar bill will make you feel better about yourself. This was perhaps the best $5 dollars ever spent in the history of public relations. All is fair in love, war, and marketing.

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4. “Basketball,” Jason Newsted

Video still (1:54), Youtube

© 1992 Warner Bros.

Even their basketball is black. This is how serious metal is. Jason, the eternal kid brother of Metallica, does a backwards hook shot whose point is left unclear, edited out before the basketball goes or doesn’t go through the net. I imagine the bonus features including demonstrations of their unexpected deftness at Jenga, frisbee, hacky sack, and other things the Grateful Dead would probably be good at. For every unhappy acne-faced boy too shy for girls but too cool for school, he can take a black sharpie and draw the Metallica logo on his binder, thus joining a secret society, an adolescent’s peek into the near profound — of double bass drums and the thick palm-muted crunch of an open low E-string grinding away at a riff. This secret society, of course, is not so secret, but tell that to 5. a kid who just discovered something big, and who cares if the world already knew. Virgin taste always tastes the best. I took my allowance and bought the world I would live in for the half decade or so, opaque plastic beige cassette tapes as light tombstones balanced on my bed, squinting at the tiny lyrics. Metallica’s legacy may be constrained to their first four albums, and their subsequent ventures proof that it’s better to burn out than fade away. I’ll never apologize for pop-’s stigma and prefix before metal, or anything else, a sweaty shirtless me in my room going fucking ballistic, lanky arms flailing so many times at invisible cymbals I must have, statistically, at least made one basket.

The four main writers merely act as barriers between which a lot of exciting stuff happened and do not serve to preclude, only maintain, discourse — though rather auspiciously placed, as both pairings represent their respective vastly different approaches in writing, however within the same social contexts and under similar preoccupations. Much of the chart, hopefully, is self-explanatory; I will only mention how Faulkner brought Joyce’s “high modernism” from Europe to the States (as Pollock did, or was delegated to do, with painting), and to the South, of all places. I’ve always found this moment very important in literary history. One wonders what would have happened without that. It was also difficult to link Joyce as coming from anything, other than loosely to Flaubert, due to the latter’s incipient play and self-consciousness with language. Hemingway also does this odd straddling thing: he wrote existential novels in the context of American social realism, and much of it war. As simple as his books — or at least sentences — were, he was a very complicated writer. Most of the others fit somewhat easily among their contemporaries.

Addendum in Response to Commentary Concerning the Canon, and Other Qualms

This is being written the day after this post was first published, in a way that is both emotionally petty i.e. defensive, but more so, verily, out of a sense of responsibility, as my hand has been again led into the fervent political waters which many of our more dissenting readership, perhaps in need of a jacuzzi, like going. When I made the graph, I knew it only represented the mainly White Male canon, and that our more educated (though a quick wikipedia search will explain it perfectly well) would undoubtedly mention it in a kind of impulse which sustains — but never attempts or wants to resolve — the ongoing grad school-y argument over [whatever the current word for bad is e.g. "power," "patriarchy," "canonical"] vs. [whatever the current word for good is e.g. "the other," "minority," "queer," "post-{something}"], and no matter what disclaimers, caveats, or preemptive apologies this contributor would propose in this post’s very explicit text, pale angry people with most likely more than one cat and degree would serve me with: (1) a list of authors they felt were unfairly omitted, with implications of my being coerced; (2) an open, or at least implied, call for an apology for not having a more inclusive chart, or having a literary orientation different from them; and (3) an attack on the very medium with which this post is conveyed, namely, a blog on the internet, with allusions to a collective truncated attention span or learning. I will now address each concern.

1. I think we all commodify the very authors we ostensibly herald or even defend by naming, and thus consuming, them in the same manner one would name a band, or restaurant, or movie, or city, or any pairing of letters which embody cultural merit or experience, because, really, we are collecting marbles. This is an issue of class, of who is entitled to what names. Those who shun the canon are in socioeconomic collusion with them; that is, to name “the other,” regardless if one is, points to a precedent of educational privilege. This is an imperialist impulse, so I understand. Still, the romantic part of me thinks it’s endearing how we honor our love for someone by naming them, by placing them in our hearts, as I do Joyce, or you Didion, or you [some name I never heard of and can't pronounce]. I feel better now.

2. I will not apologize for my non-inclusive list. This website’s width is 600 pixels, and I wanted the font to be legible, so you can imagine my constraints. I’m sorry I did not name every author in existence, a list exhaustive enough to exhaust some exhausting people. I will admit, however, that there is something counter-intuitive about naming off the canon on a website which offers itself as subversive — but more than that, this website is about not giving a fuck, so in honoring that, I don’t give a fuck. There are many, many socially more responsible and pensive literary websites you can go to and be politically, socially, and aesthetically well-adjusted with. If you come here, you will find me being incorrect in some way. Always. That is my loyalty to this place, and myself.

3. When a person with austere taste goes online and contributes to the very noise he seems so somberly subdued by, he is legitimizing that medium’s power. I made someone in a cabin sans wifi/wife embalmed by a fireplace put a bookmark inside War and Peace, walk 4 miles along the thawing snow to the public library, and type in a comment which included European last names. Come over more often, we are insane.

I first thought Noam Chomsky was a woman, maybe because of the soft vowels in his first name, or because I found, and still do, his linguistic approach to be gentle, considerate, and receptive. These are great qualities in writing, which I generally attribute to women, who often make better writers, but historically were not given an equal chance to write and publish due to a complex set of institutional matters. See? That wasn’t so hard. During college, in a damp seminar room which exuded patience, I kept referred to him as “she,” and the (this was some political theory class, in UC Santa Cruz) feministy T.A. sort of looked at me with huge grateful eyes, like I single-handedly had done what her Ph.D. was trying to do. They were almost watery, verging on the warm version of the cold mindless rain tapping from above. My ignorance was both endearing and politically convenient. Race and Gender are rent-a-cops at the mall dressed in authority. They are unreal, like you and me. I want to go back to that seminar room, of half-empty water bottles occasionally chugged out of pure boredom in front of a tearful grad student and tuitions being burnt after some prior weed. “If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion,” she said. One day someone will write a great nasty book again. “Okay,” I replied.

My favorite word to use when describing writing is “tone,” though actually looking the word up in the dictionary, I realize its definitions all relate to sound, not meaning. The closest implication of meaning i.e. rhetoric is: a particular quality, way of sounding, modulation, or intonation of the voice as expressive of some feeling, spirit, etc. I have either been using the word incorrectly, or — either on behalf of or bestowed from tone — I have simply used the word as a writer is given license to — all of which point to the problem I had in making this grid. Once I appointed an author his or her grave dot, I grew unsure of why I put them there; or rather, became littered with contrary evidence. Their coordinates merely represent my “gut” instinct, which I think, as writers, however, we are irrevocably liable for. Writing is like being in a relationship: how the other person feels is really how it is. Let me just take one example, Ishiguro: he’s just over into the ironic side because he seems self-aware and almost critical/cynical at times; he also seems weary of “the novel,” and his attempts at them seem to be both homages and challenges. He’s in the figurative camp because — while his actual sentences are quite literal — he employs many oblique techniques (specifically, for him, reticence) by which the overall meaning of his books are portrayed. This is the kind of thought that went into each author. It will be hard not to notice the author who’s dead center, obviously a rhetorical exercise, perhaps tribute, which acknowledges his near-perfect tone. One may see all other authors as deviating from the kind of unexpected calm balance his manic obsessiveness and ceaseless skepticism of authorial resolve was able to bring about. The impulse would be to put him deep into ironic-figurative field, but his provincial inquiry into the human condition was rather, awesomely, conventional. If there is such a thing as a solemn pun, we may (or may we) all be his foster children. I feel like a bunch of people are going to tell me that I put so-and-so in the wrong place, then, using words like “a little,” “left,” “up,” “nudge,” etc., are going to describe where they would put the author, making me feel like they either skimmed over my inferred concession or ignored them. Or maybe thoughts are fun, so please. Though if someone mentions the disproportionate ratio of female to male authors, I will be first be embarrassed, then saddened. To not see the message in order to present one is often the failure of words.

1) On August 17, 1991, in CMT studios in Culver City, California, Kurt Cobain was, or at least affectedly, seen deep in the throes of executing a dissonant power chord. The video was lit as a Caravaggio painting, the dirty yellow umbers of indoor light shutting off the blue sky. A spotlight reflecting off the drum kit acts as fire, the incipient spark of a generation. The casting call summoned extras aged 18 – 25 years old dressed in “high-school persona i.e., preppy, punk, nerd, jock…,” the abbreviated, yet sadly accurate, ethos of our youth. The basketball hoop, perennial throughout the entire video, seemed both detached and stately as a crucifix. It represented the high school stadium, that place of mutual assembly, of cheerleaders and meanness, the constellation of gum hidden under bleachers. If the reader will bear with me, he and she will accept that everyone who entered CMT studios that day a little before 11:30 am was — besides one-or-two effectively null Asians (in our forthcoming yet apparent context) — white, which is less of a problem than a benign concession to the binary of race. It was simply time for white kids to freak out, and that’s okay. I’m glad I was there. 2) In 1994, following the controversial publication of The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, which linked race to inherent qualities or even dispositions, a tenured anthropologist at U.C. Berkeley offered Michael Jordan as an example of a black person’s inherent talent, perhaps even genius, in physical ability — in this case jumping with inhuman ability — whose allusions to intellectual deficiency were sad yet subliminal. The book was quickly both dismissed and heralded by the suspecting parties. What concerns me here, though, is not race and a fractured America, of white and black boys and their respective thwarted fates proposed by dreams, but the delusional colorless hope shared by both: to see a pedestrian God so close yet so far from the net, frozen in the grace of their flourish, arms doing perfectly what needed to be done for their followers. The heavy wane of disappearing youth as a chord which drones for a long time afterwards, decades even. Two points stuffed by a weightless man, a marbled pose chiseled by spectacle, a stadium of held breath, high past a line from which others could only dare throw.

On August 26, 2007, Owen Wilson was taken to a hospital in Santa Monica, California, after slashing his wrists in a suicide attempt. A friend tells People magazine “he almost did not make it”; that Wilson’s near fatality was reduced to a cliché in a glossy may be the reason why he questioned his life, or we might question ours. Wilson had also recently broken up with Kate Hudson, so she may consider herself flattered. The truth is we will never know what went on in the mind of a made man. The money and success just not enough. Months later, The Darjeeling Limited (2007) was released, in which Wilson — his character having just suffered a horrible motorcycle accident — is seen ineffectively wearing a bunch of gauze. He and his brothers went to find their father; not his corpse, but emotional legacy. Owen’s real life brother Luke Wilson has his own suicide scene in The Royal Tennenbaums, his wrists streaming blood over curly locks of cut hair in Starry Night blue. On December 23, 1889, Vincent Van Gogh cuts off his ear (or merely the lobe, he claims) in a brothel, and hands it to a prostitute for safe keeping; Gauguin is to find him later on that night in his bed covered in blood. Some art historians propose that it was actually Gauguin who did it during a heated argument; others say it was Van Gogh’s clingy response to Theo (his brother and sole patron) getting engaged. To others, simply a bad night with a hooker. The truth is we will never know what went on in the mind of a mad man. In another similar self-portrait painted presumably that week, or even day, for he wears the same outfit, a Japanese print on the wall behind him shows two mothers and their children situated immediately next to his good ear, whispering over waves.

In Hotel Chevalier (2007), a 13 min prologue to The Darjeeling Limited, after a couple make love in the titular hotel, the now relieved man — perhaps simply in need of something to do, or per the parenthetical directions in the script — shows off the clustery view from his balcony, which may be an extension of  our director showing off his taste to us. Wes Anderson’s style is style itself: self-conscious, perhaps a little self-satisfied in its ingratiating measure towards the very audience for which the films are made. Watching a Wes Anderson film is like standing in a circle at a party automatically laughing at anything resembling a joke, and suddenly being stricken with the fearful question: Am I like this? I found myself giggling, though, to Jason Schwartzman holed up in a hotel room grimly administering the logistics of a booty-call, having been in similarly heart-pattering and depleting situations before. He is unhappy; she probably high. He, an explicit mustache; she, oblique bruises. First world problems have always been so, however more austere in the century or two preceding ours. Of Van Gogh’s “Paris rooftops” (c. 1886), we see a painter still sulky under the monochrome grey-blues, not yet released into the rays of light by which he would be forever stricken. The dutch painter went to Paris convinced of its light, only to slather titanium white mixed with Naples yellow — itself named after an Italian city promising light. That the quest for artistic “material” in a city or a lover keeps the tourism and lingerie industry afloat, respectively, is free-market’s loyal bow to us. We never see them make love, only the kind distance between them afterwards.

One of my friends, a woman painter in her mid-forties living in Moss Landing, California, carries a sad look around her. She once made me eggs in a cast-iron skillet with a tablespoon of butter, which exuded happiness, or at least lubed it, though the chef was still sad. I looked out the window and saw nothing really, and wondered if that was also the view from outside. Everyday, her cat elsewhere, she pushes goop around on a canvas hoping to see another person inside. Suicide’s stylization is the advertisement of ennui — a fancy French word for not having any real problems. Chronic depression is child you have. It is born and must be fed. It learns the language you speak, gathers your mannerisms. It grows into an adult, with fully realized neurons, and cries on your death bed. Life is a kid we never wanted.

She (I was to be told this story by a mutual friend, upon my inquiry) went to India when she was youngish, in her early twenties, when the world still seems like an open autobiography, and evidently “came back sorta fucked,” though those are my words. I asked what could be so fucked about a Siddhartha or Eat, Pray, Love-ish experience, and she, the story-teller, said “no, it wasn’t that; she just got really sick.” Like she almost died, though the near death experience didn’t thrust her towards life. It simply lingered there, the white light of a dentist’s office. I felt bad. I still do. I picture a bunch of unsatisfied people in this country, this grand first world country with clean water and dirty Gods, going to a country with dirty water and clean Gods, to negotiate happiness, to bargain for it, to try to find “something” in a world whose atomic constituent was built, literally, upon nothing. And we wonder why we’re empty. Van Gogh ended up shooting himself in the belly in a wheat field. Some say it was to prolong his death; others say he was simply too scared to shoot himself in the head. He tried to be a Minister, but no one listened.

I never actually saw The Darjeeling Limited, which can be both a concession and assertion. The Friday night excitement in line for a movie always seemed sad to me, like I would always picture each person in line in bed later on that night, having seen the movie, and how those flashes of light so seemingly real and so loud were ultimately flattened by the black roll of credits at the end. People go back to their apartments and get into not-so-cleverly-written arguments. There’s always an old woman, alone in the back, who stays for the entire credits, as if looking for someone she knows. When the theater is finally black, and boys with brooms come in to clean up the laughter-spilt popcorn, she embarrassingly gets up and enters her own life again. The real one with nerve endings and a twisted heart. The first scene usually involves me. On the sidewalk, hugging myself in the cold.

1.

I never went to prom, but imagine myself seeing quadruple, if only met by one pretty girl on the staircase, that suburban altar towards the heaven of bedrooms. The Vogue ad lens of that movie is nap inducing. Tumblr recently banned content depicting self-harm; namely, cutting, suicide, and eating disorders. Many of my 2:00am k-holes led me to these tumblrs, to 90 pound girls who ironically made me feel fat, each with thighs and wrists marked red like a slave’s back. Freedom must be hard to bear. “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2,” M. Duchamp (1912), is a portrayal of one woman seen at different moments in time, less notable for its Cubism than the fact that it is one of the few canvases Duchamp ever painted. Before times they were a-changin’ (Dylan, 1964) angles were a-changin’ (Picasso/Braque, c. 1910 ). I imagine Sofia Coppola growing up in pajamas and flipping through ponderous MOMA monographs once crushing a mahogany coffee table now her thin lap. Trip’s one lucky bro, graffitied on that sacred piece of cotton redolent of fabric softener and teen musk. A girl’s secret is oft verbal, a name given to a dream, the letters forming the boy better than the actual boy. Of Étant donnés (1966) we are outside (inside the Philadelphia Museum of Art) looking in as if we were inside, seemingly, looking out. That dirty secrets are seen through holes may explain why thought bubbles are shaped that way, opaque, some explosion next to one’s head.

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2.

Should I stay or should I go’s quandary as expressed in the annihilation of a perfectly tuned bass has always embodied #whitepeopleproblems, its hashtag a translucent fishing wire snagging fallen Roman, English, and American empires, in that order. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a sensitive guy whose capacity for unnecessary depression is augmented in direct correlation to his perceived, and fairly accurate, downfall of a relationship with a beautiful woman with probably more than one Kate Spade handbag, whose irl monthly budget (according to the actress’s divorce filing) averages to $22,550 a month, the latter $550 we can imagine maintaining those bangs. Vanilla Goth Boy’s problem, if he followed baseball, is that she’s out of his league. Getting to third base alone during self-batting practice is not impressive, to continue our baseball metaphor. Young boys always think the way to the red spongy trophy of a girl’s heart is through a moody mixtape — that he too, in her mind, might play an instrument and be in a band, that odd effeminate virility of sensitivity and stage swag and antics hinting at bedside behaviors. I enjoy imagining Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard, Deschanel’s recent divorcée, slouched over his acoustic guitar imagining some girl with equally great bangs moving her hips to the song being played under his fingers, then perhaps over him around his fingers, before she’s over him, giving him the finger.

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3.

In Howl (2010), Ginsberg and Kerouac, before gayness, partied as lit bros with artsy girls dancing to African-American music holding Pabst beer and sharing drags. Typing that almost made me barf. Not much has changed. Magritte lived with his mom most of his life, and perhaps resented the love people find and violently push into one another. When I see a fresh red heart in facebook’s “is now in a relationship” status update, I secretly wait for its full metastasis into a tumor. I’m small. Ginsberg’s date is giving off some major fuck me eyes, proof that they are windows not to the soul, but zipper. The painter who looks book like young Ginsberg and our current James Franco is Frank Stella working on his grid-y ’60s abstractions, whose canvas’s shapes dictate the incipient line by which all subsequent ones are referred. Heady theory, but he saw himself as a frail manufacturer of painting-like objects, the wavering “free hand” as inadvertent style, committed yet vapid. And yes, it is the hand of this reviewer who continues Stella’s lines in the woman’s dress, she who smiles at Ginsberg’s Howl, the dude in front’s wisps of grey exhale one day to be marked in his hair, he older, less ideal. The film ends, as most bio pics do, with the actual Ginsberg singing a song accompanied by an accordion, folding in, folding out, its loyal wheeze both timeless and a little annoying.