Knifethrust of Thought

Madness as Sanity, Reality as Madness: These were popular terms in the nineteen-seventies, a time when the twinning of opposites seemed profoundly philosophical and concepts such as these were intensely meaningful to someone with an armful of horse.

Oxymoron: new movie

Egos today are like those huge balloons floating bland-faced and with absurd solemnity above the crowds in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, except the balloons are tethered to the reality of tow-trucks navigating a complex course through congested streets.

Some of those who cast off religion (as being insufficiently hip) but continue to experience spiritual hunger wind up plunging into such ethereal realms of soul-questing as astrology, Scientology, fortune-telling, white witchery and New Age blatherbloat.  Before long they’re channeling Rock Hudson and Bella Abzug and joyously waggling their hands like Yes-God-ing gospel singers; and their throbbing souls (which they had said they didn’t “believe in” anymore) are ripe for plucking by manipulating apostles.  Gore Vidal and Joyce Carol Oates wrote novels about this rhapsodic idiocy that will scare the hell out of you.

Speaking of Gore Vidal, he didn’t look like a wretched old Queen until he started launching the little bee bees that are all he has remaining from his blunderbuss days as the pinup girl of Marxian polemics.  Oddly enough, I met him in 1990 at a fundraiser during his surreal—it could have been directed by Fellini—Senatorial campaign in California, and he never looked me in the eye, though all I said to him was, “How are you?”  On the other hand, his sulky lips and aristocratic jaw worked perpetually as though he’d got some peanut particles lodged inside the crevices of his teeth.  Aha, I thought.  A man who’s not comfortable with his masquerade.  (When they asked me, “What about the money?”, on my way out, I replied, “I’m the wrong flavor, friend.  I bleed red.  I was just here to see the bon vivant and litterateur, not the hard-charging candidate.”)

Educators seem pretty ignorant to me.  They want to keep little Johnny from knowing anything that might upset him.  And stupid me, here I always thought the purpose of education was to teach little Johnny how to handle problems, which include being upset, yes?

Whatever happened to harmonic dissonance?  People seem oblivious to their not even having tried to merit the lofty attributes their egos require them to ascribe to themselves.

The way a child grows into adulthood is by having his good-natured sense of humor, his sly mischievousness, his adoring loyalty and his fine companionship discouraged and devalued systematically until he’s liberated to become a spirit-stunted prick like the rest of us.

Hollywood celebrities who “make statements on politics” resemble fart-cushions.

Despite appearances, most people’s behavior is not irrational; it’s neurotic, i.e., dysfunctional in rational ways.  But because we imagine that certain people—most of them, in fact–are irrational, we solicitously counter their bizarreness with our light-wand of rationality, to no avail, because their maladjustment is spawned not in the intellectual faculty but in the awful chaotic swirl of modern life. I think we ought to reverse the terms of the process and purposely act irrationally in order to snap such people out of their neuroses.  The next time you run into that smarmy little self-deprecator who works down the hall, ask, “Why did you dye your hair blue?” and instantly leave the room. The baffled neurotic, imploding with uncertainty and doubt, will then take a couple of baby steps along the path to eventual normalcy by hastening to find a mirror so he can verify his hair color, then wondering why you might have spoken so strangely.  (Point #1: Your insanity acts like a cattle prod, shocking his malady into the open.)  The second time you see the patient, offer this assurance: “I don’t blame you for killing your wife.  Your secret is safe with me”; and then go away again.  After this encounter, the subject will begin to objectify his thinking as he tries to figure out what in the hell your problem is. (Point #2: Objectification is the sine qua non of emotional salubrity.) Keep this going, and the day will come when you two collide at the water cooler and the former human ant colony says, “You don’t play badminton, do you?  I just took it up and it looks like I’ve got a real talent for it!”

The fact that many people today communicate in disjunctive squeaks and croaks accompanied by an array of primitive gestures, supplies the ultimate response to a proposition first voiced c. 1967: “Don’t let the rules of grammar get in the way of your self-expression, man.  Let it all hang out.”  Dropping the rules of grammar resulted irresistibly in the self’s no longer being linguistically expressible by a large percentage of the population to any degree at all.

Al Gore is to politics as Paulie Shore is to movies and as Anna Nicole Smith is to television—surreal nonentities who inspire the kind of whickering laughter we produce when we can’t believe our eyes.

“Objectivity is impossible to achieve.  We don’t even try to be objective anymore.  The whole idea is boring.”  Spoken by a nationally known journalist on C-Span.  I would say that as it relates to journalism, objectivity means not a perfect renovation of the journalist’s psyche, but simply balanced reporting—honestly balanced reporting that represents accurately and adequately the issues involved in a story. Taking my cue from Jefferson, I have always thought the function of journalism is to report the relevant facts of an event so the reader/viewer can judge for himself what they mean.  But the prominent journalist on C-Span said (I quote from memory):“The average person isn’t competent to judge for himself.  Today’s journalists have all been to graduate school. [!]  The people need to acknowledge us as their interpreters of events.”  If the people aren’t competent to judge for themselves (and they probably aren’t, really, thanks to our imploding educational system), why haven’t journalists made it their affair to help their audience reacquire this basic civic capability?  I hardly believe the Constitution safeguards the press’ freedom of speech in order for it to tell us what to think.  [Note: There is a fault line in the gentleman’s argument.  If he can’t objectify factual matters, on what grounds does he base the contention that objectification is, speaking objectively, impossible?  He has no trouble objectifying the negative.]

“Deer in the headlights” scarcely does justice to the paralyzed expressions of the cable-news anchors (hired because they’re dynamite babes if they’re females, and “personable” if they’re men) when they attempt to interview guests who know their stuff: “What do you think is you-know going to happen, Major, if the prime minister premier or is it president whatever doesn’t go along you-know with the stuff our guys are saying?  What’s your take on it-this, Major? Are we going to put our boots on the ground er ah in the sand so to speak?”

Ambitions of the Young. I: Listening to some young people talk about their “plans”—to become rock stars, movie stars, CEOs, media magnates, big-bucks athletes, television celebrities—I am reminded of those late-night infomercials which purport to show you how to make millions and millions of dollars in a matter of hours: “First you buy downtown Cincinnati….”  The target audience doesn’t know enough to grasp the flagrant absurdities of palaver like this, because they’ve never considered what their dreams entail.  “I didn’t want to ‘be a writer,’” said William Faulkner.  “I wanted to write.”

Given how our culture has devolved—i.e., into narcissistic appearance-ism— a man whose psychology prompts him to seek the presidency is the very man we least need to have serving in that position.

Hollywood, Cradle of the Gold-Plated Castrato: A semi-tropical desert become a verdant fantasy park despite the absence of actual weather through the beguiling sorcery of agricultural irrigation.  The altar of tasteless excess on which the carcass of Integrity has long since blanched in the sun.  A hyperbolic monument of strident vibrating neon to all the cheap souls exterminated by the treacheries of art commerce.  Accurate to the smallest detail, faithful only to the spirit of rapine.  The town where no means, “Offer me some more money,” and yes means, “But I get to fuck you first.”  Where people walk backwards in order to see the knives coming.  Where egos drift serenely across the empyrean like dirigibles.  Where slack-jawed women enthrall themselves from the looking-glass above the bed while their hairy-backed producers seek to elude their own perfidy by stuffing their entire bodies into the crevice of the Rotting Goddess.  Where chicken-liver shakes its booty at Giorgio, and Rolls takes a dump on Mercedes. Where “opportunity missed” means a body is still on its feet.  Where the values in the screenplays are guessed at by the self-mutilated eunuchs who not only can’t get their values up anymore, but can’t remember how it ever felt to have values.  Where minimal self-respect requires the bloody abolition of all the other sleazoids doing business in this town.  And where the Nine Muses alighted from the train in 1939 to get a feel for the place, but within the hour reentered the train and departed, never to grace these inhospitable precincts again.

The Idea of Phart: An amalgam of “phony” plus “art”, this term designates the exhibitions of the little nothing self-promoting charlatans who lack even the minimal artistry necessary to make it in the art-is-a-major-investment sweepstakes.  Their “work” may also be described as “tabloid art” because the little preening suck-ass nothings vie for the public’s attention on the basis of sensationalism.  Artistically, on the other hand, they operate on the basis of anti-imagination: 42-miles of fuchsia-tinted Saran Wrap unspooling across the highlands of Bulgaria; Jesus in a bottle of piss together with the Virgin Mary sculpted out of dogshit; 36 amputated titties in eleven rows of three plus another three on the ceiling; the actual corpse of an obese grandmother asphyxiated by the action of her support-hose cutting off her circulation; six little boys dressed as nuns throwing darts at The Artist Himself while the latter creates profane tattoos out of his flesh wounds; a python in a maze wriggling its way towards a day-old puppy at the terminus.  Speaking qualitatively, what is the difference between this bathetic junk and a freak show at the local fairground or, for that matter, Ripley’s Believe It or Not? In our great land it’s not what you do that counts, it’s what you call what you do.

The essential precept of Baby Boomerism boils down to this: “The rules are made for everybody else. They’re certainly not going to get in my way.”

Whatever Happened to Harmonic Dissonance? IV: Why do the people who idolize John F. Kennedy clamor for gigantic tax-and-spend programs, when it was JFK who said, “Ask not what your country can do for you…”?  Shouldn’t they either comply with his admonition or adopt a new figurehead?