I Early Thoughts: It’s All Really Simple
The NBA playoffs are always an overly long slog, not just a Manichean struggle.
Culturewatch
Cleveland Rocks
Cleveland’s sports venues are now 30 years old. The franchise owners want to have either major upgrades to the facilities or brand-new structures. The current stadiums and arena as well as the former Cleveland Municipal Stadium were built with public money which establishes a precedent. On the other hand, the long-gone Cleveland Arena and the Richfield Coliseum were owned and run privately without taxpayer assistance.
Mussolini, Europe’s Prize Bluffer More Like Bottomley[1] than Napoleon
Excerpted from an article published by Ernest Hemingway in 1923…
…Mussolini is the biggest bluff in Europe. If Mussolini would have me taken out and shot tomorrow morning I would still regard him as a bluff. The shooting would be a bluff. Get hold of a good photo of Signor Mussolini sometime and study it. You will see the weakness in his mouth which forces him to scowl the famous Mussolini scowl that is imitated by every 19-year-old Fascisto in Italy. Study his past record. Study the coalition that Fascismo is between capital and labor and consider the history of past coalitions. Study his genius for clothing small ideas in big words. Study his propensity for dueling. Really brave men do not have to fight duels, and many cowards duel constantly to make themselves believe they are brave. And then look at his black shirt and his white spats. There is something wrong, even histrionically, with a man who wears white spats with a black shirt.
There is not space here to go into the question of Mussolini as a bluff or as a great and lasting force. Mussolini may last fifteen years or he may be overthrown next spring by Gabriele D’Annunzio, who hates him. But let me give two true pictures of Mussolini at Lausanne.
The Ambassador (Redux)
Ambassador Poole from the late great Golden State has been banished to a terrible team, The Washington Wizards. Since he was sucker-punched by an envious Draymond Green, JP has had a Jamesian education in a world of lies. Two days before he was traded, Golden State’s new GM, had assured journalists that Poole and Jonathan Kuminga would remain by the Bay: “We love having those guys here. Jordan, especially with his contract extension, we plan to have him here for 4 more years at least.” (That “at least” is priceless.) Poole is, per his own words, “a child of God.” As a Christian, he’s probably trying not to cultivate his vengeful side, but I’m under no effing obligation. Ca ira to NOT root for a team run by scum. And I’m not talking (chiefly) about the egotist who punched Jordan here. I’m talking about the pale scum, the thickest scum, the scummiest scum who never dared to stand up to Draymond Green.
What follows is the (anxious) tribute to JP I posted earlier this spring. May there be more Poole parties in his/our future!
Boners, Interiors, Bourgeois Bonheur & “The Boxer”: Quick and Dirty Angles on Bonnard
Pierre Bonnard, Nu (Nude, Yellow Screen) 1920
I missed this painting’s tumescent essence when I first saw it in the Bonnard show at the Aquavella gallery. The hard-on architectonics of its straight-up parallel lines didn’t come through to me until I was walking home around the Central Park reservoir. Thin phallic high-rises on the cityscape’s horizon had a Eureka effect. Suddenly I could sense the erection behind Bonnard’s construct.
You Made Beauty a Monster to Me
..I took the train to Sacramento. I thought about killers and about their victims, too. I thought about how I must be the only whore and the only romantic (which is to say, the only detective) on the entire train, or at least in my compartment. Did that mean the rest of the train was full of killers, or, at least, of accomplices? I was on my way to spend the weekend with Harvey. We had a small fight before I left, because my top surgery was coming up, and I said that if I couldn’t get the surgery I’d probably kill myself, and they said that was obsessive, they were worried about me, and I said but that’s why I’m getting the surgery, so I don’t have to kill myself, so I can be happy. It took me a long time to realize that I live, more than most people, entirely by instinct, in the murky sea of my instincts (my oceanic body), and that I never weigh the pros and cons of my actions, never think deductively, never imagine the forking paths my life could take, though in retrospect those paths, those labyrinths, become objects of dread and fascination (or is it that, instead of paths, life-in-retrospect becomes nothing but a series of crumbling, hallucinatory towers, a drowned dream, a womb that’s also a grave?) My reality is my body, and the other way around. When I was younger, I thought this meant I didn’t have dreams, since I didn’t have plans, bourgeois plans, but in fact it meant I was a consummate dreamer, that I dreamt with my eyes open. I became an alcoholic for twenty years entirely in an instant, without premeditation, just like I moved to South America for no real reason, or for entirely romantic reasons, just like I let Rebecca move in with me after our first date, just like one day I started taking hormones without thinking about it. I feel bad for people who aren’t like this, like me. I feel closer to a flower, a supernova, a subway schizophrenic, than to a res cogitans, a thinking thing. On the train, I read No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai and watched the sunset.
Work With Me Anna (A Tina Turner Diary)
J.T. Lewis wrote up “my Tina Turner story” a couple years ago. Wish it wasn’t on time again but…
Disney Time With Conner O’Malley
Since I last wrote about comedian/videomaker Conner O’Malley in 2020, he’s been posting much less frequently to YouTube, as his work has become more ambitious and elaborate. His latest, “Rebranded Mickey Mouse”, went online in March – and it may be his best to date. O’Malley compresses so much gobsmacking bizarreness – scary-funny-weird narrative surprises, uncanny use of deepfakes and grandiose world-building – into its ten-minute running time that he seems to have assembled all the elements of a totally fresh, satirical aesthetic. It both begs for and beggars analysis.
I won’t ruin it for you by attempting to summarize the story. [Editor’s Note: Watch it below!] But for starters, know that “Rebranded Mickey Mouse” refers to the video’s protagonist (O’Malley) – a young man who has given up his original human identity to embody a Jokerfied reboot of the Disney character.
O’Malley’s expertly tweaking the empty-headed Hollywood trend of gritty, “adult” adaptations of kiddie IP – like the just-announced TV series depicting Winnie the Pooh’s old pal Christopher Robin as “a disillusioned New Yorker navigating his quarter-life crisis with the help of the weird talking animals who live beyond a drug-induced portal outside his derelict apartment complex.”
On Richard Wolin’s “Heidegger in Ruins”
This short sprint to the starting gate of a review of Richard Wolin’s solid “Anti-Heidegger,” his recent polemical book Heidegger in Ruins (Yale University Press, 2023).
Fifty years ago, Walter Kaufmann had already reduced Being and Time to bare life, noting how abusive Heidegger’s German was; how evident but unremarked the bleak mood during and after Germany’s World War I defeat, reappearing as Heidegger’s mood of “anxiety” (think: trench warfare) and as a requirement for authenticity; how close to plagiarism were Heidegger’s views on being-toward-death, considering Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
Kaufmann is droll and incisive on the academic resistance to criticism of Heidegger even in Heidegger’s own time. After declaring that classical scholars found Heidegger’s reading of a fragment of Anaximander to be untenable; that Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant “was widely repudiated by Kant scholars”; and that professors of literature considered Heidegger’s readings of Hölderlin, Rilke, and Trakl, among others, way stations to the destruction of German literature, Kaufmann concludes: “Even so (emphasis added, SC; read closely!), some who know their Kant are awed by the erudition of Heidegger’s classical interpretations; Nietzsche scholars find his Rilke essay stimulating and profound; and Rilke scholars bow before his Nietzsche exegesis.”[i]
Apocalypse
..I went to a friend’s Eid party and left within five minutes, because the moment I got there I knew I was in no state to be there, to be around people, the truth is I’d been spiraling out for at least a week, one night I relapsed, went out drinking with Christian and tried to buy coke at three in the morning and asked him if he would ever fuck a trans woman, to which he said no, but Harvey told me that was a lie, or wasn’t true (something that’s not true and a lie are two different things), and the next day Xylea came over to take care of me, she brought over cute little Daiso items and a cactus and held me in my bed and told me I was a beautiful person, and I told her I was in love with her, to which she said nothing, or almost nothing, and then the next day, or the day after that, I burned our friendship to the ground,
Nobody Knows His Name: A Note on Adam Scheffler’s “Heartworm” (& “Googling Myself”)
“Piss expressively.”
The onomatopoeic first line of Adam Scheffler’s poem, “Advice From a Dog,” hints at his virtuosity and his modesty. This guy ain’t too proud to pet and be petted. Another one of his openers make you wonder if he’s about to give himself too much credit: “She said my butt was a piece of art…” Not to worry:
…my greatest asset, if
you will, although come to think of
it she didn’t say it was good art
only a “piece” of it, as if it’s
not complete without her hands
on it…
Scheffler is careful about intimacies. I doubt he’ll ever go Lowell. There won’t be lines from a begging (or pegging) partner’s correspondence in his poems. Nor does this nice Jewish boy suffer from Maileria. He’s no wannabe macho.
Far Gone (A Levin Compaction)
The 1000 pp. Novel: (1960-70)
Verse VII
Stanza B
It was a far out bar Maxs Drop Dead Inn.
You know who drank there?
Men and Women
“Men and women are Images, hanging ghosts in the air, faces painted on the wall, masks no face can enter, the rules of a game getting explained over and over again to everyone and getting explained by getting played. They are images, but they are not immaterial (nothing is immaterial): they determine who produces what, who lives what life, who is punished for breaking what rules, who can be raped with impunity, who can be beaten with impunity, who can be killed with impunity.”
..One time, Xylea said, a client was supposed to go down on me and cum on my feet, but he kept trying to fuck me, and so I started going on a long rant about Aileen Wuornos (the lore of Aileen Wuornos, the litany of her crimes, crimes like a Dadaist poem, a poem written in the flesh about the goddess Medusa and about men and about the abyss) and then when he tried to stick his dick in me I stabbed him, and he looked up at me like what the fuck, and I was like why do you think I was telling you about Aileen fucking Wuornos, retard?
“Old Violin” & Hate Songs
Anger is an energy. Per Johnny Rotten and Richard Meltzer, though I couldn’t recall where/when Meltzer mused on animus in rock ‘n’ roll attitude so I asked him for a steer…
I’m sure—I know—I’ve said it…and things much like it…in lots of places over the years, but I couldn’t give you a GPS on it…it’s just in multiple creases and cracks in the rock-roll road.
I’m sure I’ve said, specifically, that SECOND-PERSON HOSTILITY is an omnipresent aspect of rock all the way back to its Delta Blues origins, much deeper than anything as benign as “attitude”: I dislike, detest, abhor YOU. Add gender hostility to the package (usually, but not always, as “misogyny”) and you got one throbbing heap of reliably functional HATESTUFF.
Anger isn’t quite the same…no…but…well…good luck in your search.
Willie Pep: Knockaround Guy As Boxing Genius
Willie Pep got locked up a lot, mostly for gambling in the streets and driving too fast, which did nothing to dim the luster of his legendary boxing career. He was the people’s champ, and the people, too, gambled and went over the speed limit and got locked up.