ToBS R3: Dinner at Chili’s vs. middle age white male self published sci fi novel pt 1 of 4
[matchup #53 in Tournament of Bookshit]
Sticky Fingers
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.
Democratized Moments of Egoism in “Nothing Else Matters”
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.
Two Points
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.
A film I never saw
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.