Finish line
Time may be a sedative, for it’s always harder to know who exactly the bad people were, yet so easy to tell — in the incessant now from which we cannot run — who the bad people are. Either moral clarity diminishes with time, or we simply stop caring, the euphemism being humility. Prisoner of war Lt. Col. Robert L. Stirm is greeted by his family at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, California on March 17, 1973, about a year after Phan Thi Kim Phuc, aged 9, was photographed running from a South Vietnamese napalm attack on their own land after it had been occupied by the North. Richard Nixon, in his earnest paranoia loop, wondered to his Chief of Staff “if that was fixed,” upon seeing the iconic photo. Denial may be war’s greatest offense. The Strim girlfriend (wife, or sister) will come to know, understand, and to be forced to love, the dark PTSD crevices welled with ink inside Strim’s newly wired brain, as Phuc will be free to recount — with whatever pre-juvenile coping mechanisms she can employ — the senseless events of that day (June 8, 1972), its morning feigning repetition, on her little village road during her 14 month hospitalization slash 17 surgical procedures which returned her skin to human. Both enemy and kin run away from their personal and global hauntings, towards the idea of freedom, to a kind of endless finish line whose ribbons have already been broken by faster folks. And so, it’s not really a finish line, but a place to run away from something by running towards something else. Everyday we show ourselves how ugly and beautiful we can be, the shinny red inside us spilled out, touching others.
Considering my Netflix viewing activity
My recent Netflix “viewing activity,” which I discovered to my horror, follows the break. If you would like me to review any of these movies (or shows), or engage in commentary with me about any movie (or show), just list it in the comments. I will tend to this post, as best I can, for the next few days. This post may or may not be deleted, depending on the results.
Office Psycho
I once temped in the “equity research” department of a large investment firm. I had to be there at 6:30AM PST, given that markets open at 9:30AM EST in New York. Seeing the sunrise from the train felt romantic, the graffiti scratched windows cutting the sun. Daily fluctuations in the market function as a myth; the only two numbers that count are how much you buy and sell, the latter in theory exponential to the former. The gentlemen for whom I worked — my entire job consisted of printing out stock reports and making binders out of them — were all younger than me, with better educations, abs, and weekend plans. They kept me at a cordial distance yet treated me with intuitive bro code sympathy. I exuded humiliation, hiding whatever morose novel I was reading. Short of inviting me to lunch, they asked if I wanted the leftover fries upon their return. Greasy fingered and self-loathing, I printed the fuck out of various stocks — whose sudden peaks and valleys told the bipolar story of our free market — while eavesdropping on tales of roughly coordinated fellatio in sports cars during metered parking. A quarter buys diminishing time, guaranteeing itself business again. I wondered who these women were, their red lipstick further deepened by a $24 dollar glass of Côtes du Rhône seeming as blood under a sole candle flame wavering inside glass. And this is just happy hour.
Bride Stripped Bare
Between 1915 and 1923, Marcel Duchamp tedious arranged seemingly arbitrary shapes concerning a myth about a bride and her nine bachelors that he would refuse to convey to others. The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even leaves us with an eerie Avant-garde cartoon embedded between panes of cracked glass which conform to a unique “mechanomorphic” law of physics, whose notes began in 1913, he was to incorporate in The Green Box (1934), a limited edition (of 320) scrap heap compilation of its conception and execution — though let not the word “edition” and the auspices of printing fool you; he produced each one by hand. The cracks in the glass are ostensibly controlled, which may explain why he was both insane and spent eight years to create it. None is this is really meant to make any sense. Duchamp’s self-enthralled solipsisms juggle meaning and nonsense, until the viewer is just left to stare. If there is a God, he too must be a fan: In 1926, the Brooklyn Museum accidentally broke the art piece in transport, making the cracks worse (via the actual laws of physics). Marcel, unfortunately, was not there to repair what he described as a “hilarious picture” in the first place.
Spring Breakers
The controversy surrounding Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) lay not so much in its sexual inclination — to which most of Western painting, perhaps even religious, had been dedicated — but in the grotesque and primitive fashion the whores had been rendered. The painting may have been an antagonistic response to a more gentle work (Le bonhuer de vivre, 1906) by Henri Matisse, with whom the former had been in heated rivalry. It shows five prostitutes in a brothel in Barcelona, the still life at the bottom a phallic placeholder. Before racism, Europe simply eroticized Africa, where our artist had gotten tribal masks by which he was noticeably influenced. The offense, then, it seems, was less of a feminist encounter than an Anglo-Saxon European one; simply, we had been unwittingly drawn into bed with dark monsters from another land. As we gleefully await Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, which promises to be Girls Gone Wild meets Cops meets every rap video ever made, we are teased with promotional images and film stills. And it would take Selana Gomez — our lady of $4 million net worth; 14,417,325 twitter followers (as of 3/10/13, 11:29 PST); inside whom Justin Bieber first became a man — to swiftly strike a pose that came before her, Madonna, and Marilyn Monroe. An animal, when threatened, will bring their hands to their face; to retract them beyond is to exert trust, the ultimate form of control. To disarm the gaze of its power. Good girl.
On Therapy
If the split-screen dialog between Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in Annie Hall (1978) seems perfectly timed, of masterful cadence, that is because it was filmed in the same take, the actors next to each other. They built two adjacent therapists’ offices for this. Allen, of course, could have spliced the disparate takes into one, but the “organic,” however inefficient, way of doing this aids the subtly. Alvy is seen in a mahogany-lined office with a Heidegger look-alike — being and time, or rather, time being almost up. Psychotherapists may be called “shrinks” in reference to the Freudian super-ego (conscience, the cause of suffering) one tried to shrink; or, it was first a derisive term from tribal “headshrinkers” who dried the decapitated heads of their enemies. A euphemism for therapist is analyst, the Freudian ghost of anal safely tucked away in the venture. (To see “the rapist” in therapist is, however, your own problem.) Whenever I call my mental health care provider to neurotically reconfirm the breadth of my insurance, an intake counselor pensively — though trained to seem calm, casual — asks me if I feel like either harming myself or others. A phenomenological response would throw us into a two hour conversation, so I just answer No. My therapist is a homosexual Buddhist suspicious that I might be homosexual and Buddhist as well, despite all my efforts to convey otherwise.
Lovely argument
“That’s what Mommy made for dinner,” the woman behind me said. The museum was crowded the way Sundays are. Like grocery stores and churches, we apprehensively prepare for the week and the rest of our lives, respectively. I would have ridiculed her — for her provincial and self-involved inclinations towards great art — but found it, now at this point in my life, very touching. A dollop of love hardened in my throat for this dumb person. She held her daughter against her side, the latter who even grazed my ear pointing at the painting the way children always point at referents, as if to convince the world there’s only one thing, to consolidate life’s erratic foci into a single point. “Our fish didn’t look like that!” the daughter said. “Okay but the lemon did.”
The chat to my left is my response to a friend after I had excused myself to go to the bathroom, which the reader may deduce was a “number two.” The first line is an empowered assertion, perhaps stoic celebration. The second line is a critique of its aesthetics, which seems inextricably pointed, upwards, towards myself. Seems like there is a direct correlation between fecal length-girth and perceived and/or anatomical satisfaction of the experience. If this sounds familiar to other physiologies which ought to happen daily, you’re welcome. That men are all self-penetrated, however inversely, by their poop may be our best shot in having a vagina. We all know about penis envy, but frankly, I wish I had a place to hide my gummy bears. If any of this seems Freudian, or disgusting, we may have unintelligent design to blame: that our mouths and anuses are but the openings of a long and twisted tube. Notice that the letter D is next to the letter S on a standard keyboard, such that “dad” can easily replace “sad” in the ultimate critique of one’s self. Or maybe he’s just been on my mind.
Couch commentary
That a couch in an average living room faces a television may be an invitation to become what we are watching, namely, a movie — that is, if our couples would just pay attention. Lateral domesticity begs to fall asleep. A man, reduced to emasculated flab, pleads for his unhealthy and coddled relationship to continue; the tacit repose of a couple engaged at their respective laptops seems precious; some bro fantasy of simultaneous bong and munchies with anthropomorphic hump pillow; the platonic diplomacy of former lovers newly registering the full radius between them. The couch may be an obvious place for contemporary dialogue, or its reticence, but there’s something peculiar about the camera choosing the very place of its artifice to peek into these lives, as if these movie directors took for granted — or were even ashamed of — the rectangular boxes in which their creations are manifested. Perhaps we find relief in seeing others situated as us. When a DVD ends, it reverts to the menu page consisting of some thematic snippet which goes onward in an infinite loop. One may lie there out of the remote’s grasp, too tired to hit ■. It is easy to lose track of time in the waiting room of habitual inception, the ▶ untouched. Every disc sheathed inside its tray is a silver sun waiting to rise, spinning out of control. Another reason to sit down, and pretend.
Some archaeology
In 1974, Sol LeWitt made a series of “incomplete open cubes,” portraying all the possible configurations an incomplete cube could have. His early sketch studies of them resemble cuneiform, the rise from babble to meaning. The conceptual minimalist wasn’t interested in human volition, discretion, or gesture, but rather, the algorithmic underlining of things. Immune to will, art was granted a meaningless presence that could become beautiful on its own. Some of them sold at Christie’s between $50,000 – $250,000 dollars, depending on how mutated or fucked-up each one was. The more amputated the violated square looked, the more it fetched at auction. In short, absence had been purchased on a sliding scale, and maids finely dusted the masterpieces in their respective homes. His 1968 “Buried Cube Containing an Object of Importance but Little Value” is supposedly buried in its collector’s backyard. LeWitt was photographed digging a hole with a shovel though, the way condemned men are oddly obedient to their imminent executor. The will to prolong life as Darwinian tic. The IKEA “Lack” side table is $9.99 if you want it in “birch finish,” and $7.99 in plain white, a color which — when not imbued with high modernist sheen — concedes to a post-industrial grim boredom, even guilt, that is always trying to find its way back into the woods. This may be Walt Whitman’s fault, who saw a “journey work of the stars” in a blade of grass, so I have him to blame for my meandering horoscope. Everything looks so beautiful in IKEA’s labyrinthian showroom, until you haul a box full of flattened glued sawdust home. The instructions are made for the illiterate; one’s personal language reverts grunts and squeals, reduced to their hands and knees. Hours later, if you’re lucky, the representation of an ideal object has manifested inside your home, itself turned into a new object by its very representation of the original. Every clone in every home is theoretically the same, except secretly broken in unique ways. You come across a bag of screws, and hope they were extra. My personal lack holds an alarm clock for which I lament waking up, each day a slow parody of the one before, my bones buried under flesh, the birch now slowly peeling off. Imagine a species after this one coming across these objects, excavating their parts from the rubble, and trying to put the pieces back together. It might be hard to tell what was missing. The sifted legs resemble robot femurs, as if making the perfect person. They decide we were sloppy aliens. We often lied about what was underneath. In need of a place to rest our keys, and minds, we brought the strangest things home.