THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY

Night and the City

2009-03-31T12:49:00.005-04:00

Richard Widmark as the ghost of capitalism:

1) Watches his prize wrestler die in the arms of another, demonstrably inferior wrestler. In fact, the whole movie hinges on the notion that Widmark doesn't make distinctions of quality, only of advantage.

2) Widmark is the locus of female desire in this flick, in spite of, or better, because of, his anemic face and pleading eyes. The commercial sculptor downstairs with the gingerbread house full of cash doesn't stand a chance. He makes things, he owns them, but the point is to want.

It Begins

2008-11-08T12:32:00.003-05:00

It begins, our new found status in Europe -- not the one in which we're boorish and obscene and violent, but the one in which America is unfathomably progressive. With how many European leaders will Obama have to sit and smile diplomatically, patiently, as they step all over themselves explaining away some gaffe or other, or perhaps why there's no Algerian President of France. I feel some satisfaction from this.

The Patient Wakes

2008-11-05T10:47:00.002-05:00

Got out of work at midnight and walked the few miles down Broadway from the E. Village to Times Square. New Yorkers were actively seeking Whitmanic, eye-to-eye contact with me as walked down the street, and whooping when they made it. In Union Square, thousands of people were hopping in unison around a pickle-barrel drummer in a vast human vortex. I saw an African-American man in a humiliating, canary-yellow Pax deli chain uniform openly weeping behind his counter. In Times Square, thousands were out, weirdly capturing the moment on their blinking mobile devices, like hands mimicking the movement of wildflower spores in a heavy wind.

I feel as if the patient has swung her legs over the side of the hospital gurney after an eight-year illness full of sputum, bile and senile midnight chattering, and is tentatively working her feet onto the cold linoleum floor.

Three Items

2008-10-11T13:56:00.001-04:00

1) The closest thing we have in America to real satanism is hard-core christianity. Now, being that satanism is simply a type of hard-core christianity, this may be so self-evident as to be not worth mentioning.

But of course, I'm thinking specifically of Sarah Palin. Anyone in her position, who was not an absolute hedon, and who was capable of the remotest self-assessment, would have flat turned down her recent "opportunity." Alistair Crowley and Jimmy Page wrapped together had nothing so obscene to show the world as Sarah Palin's ophidian mind.

2) My own hedonism extends to having recently gathered together all my stray electronics, sold them, and received in turn an brand new XBox 360 with a wireless controller and a 60 gigabyte hard drive. Look, I'm not running for Vice President, here. Plus, it barely cost me anything. Besides (suddenly I feel defensive) I consider the novel and all its attendant self-justifications a far sight more decadent than any video game. It's as if someone spent all the time they could have in gainful employment doodling around with the singular, lonesome pleasures of typeset printing. The novel is dead, people.

That said, I find the games confusing. They're so filled with visual data I can't tell what I'm supposed to be doing. Grand Theft Auto IV is practically just an undulating field of brown, with voice acting. My eyes start bulging with strain just thinking about it. The upshot is that my chief pleasure on this machine is a cheap little throwback called Geometry Wars Evolved the Second, or something, which is basically just shooting at or avoiding blobs and dots of varying degrees of malevolence, very clearly delimited.

3) I know those best suited to understanding the economic collapse are doing their best to move the consequences of it onto me, and that the result could, for me, lead to every discomfort up to and including death. I worry, too, for the relatively modest retirement funds and holdings of my parents. Yet watching it unfold in real time, possessing as I do nothing of value (aside from an Xbox) I feel joy in my heart, real cosmic joy, at the horror and panic of those most effected by what, after the last eight years, cannot remotely be called a tragedy. I like watching these un-American jerkoffs run, though they seem to be running straight for me.

Nothing to Inherit

2008-09-26T11:37:00.003-04:00

If I'm going to have my ass taxed off, I want it to be for big, inspiring infrastructure projects. Energy projects, school projects, projects that create jobs. Obama wasn't really inspiring on this front, choosing to focus on moderate tax relief for the middle class (that essential cesspool of wankery) instead of talking about doing anything really cool with the taxes he would collect. Well, there's no use pretending that 700 Billion of that is going toward anything remotely cool or useful. It's not that you can go with the crackpot Shelby/McCain opposition on this one (hey, it just warms the cockles of my naturally socialist heart to think that at least someone's worried about socialism), it's just that the course open to us stinks. The next decade is going to be a strictly punitive one, as we replace in a purely negative capacity what has been gutted through privatization while watching streets, bridges, schools, etc. crumble -- and I won't be working any less, or getting any closer to my own personal vision of complacent wankery, during my forced participation in this debacle. Obama will win, I really think he will. I just doubt there's going to be anything to inherit.

Spore

2008-09-08T12:17:00.003-04:00

I haven't played any video games in a while. Good for me, you say, right? Don't judge me, you sons of bitches. You're the one who'd be arguing that movies were "ruined" by sound, back in the late twenties. Meet the steamroller of history, douchebag. I just picked up my pre-order of Spore and started playing it. It's my first new game since the cozily casual antics of Audiosurf.

Spore, for those of you who don't know, is a sandbox-type game (so sandboxy, in fact, it hardly counts as a game -- people have taken to calling it a toy recently). In it, you take a single-celled organism and "evolve" the thing to the point at which it walks on legs, takes to vehicles, and eventually conquers the galaxy. Everything in the game is editable, no distiction is made between biological traits and parts for spaceships. My first impression is: the time commitment is so huge, I don't think I'll ever finish it. I've been mucking around on land as a bipedal sort of monkey-snake thing for a long time, getting my ass kicked by biologically-impossible looking but obviously better-adapted creatures. My second impression is: Will Wright, the designer of the game, can be counted on to make some sort of analogy between human happiness and wealth. The question is, will it turn out to be as brilliantly parodic as it becomes in the Sims. If I finish the game, I'll let you know.

In Ignorance is Strength

2008-09-04T23:19:00.000-04:00

If they held the Nixon-Kennedy debates now, Nixon would win. His sweating and hunching and discomfort would put him over. In a small way, that's a good sign. So few Americans are competent to pay their mortgages, achieve in the collegiate arena, organize wars, fix health care, theorize either Marxism or its opposite, or eat a healthy meal seven days a week it begs the question of how the competent got that way, or how they can be expected to proceed, so armed, among the rest of us. People want to vote for the candidate most like themselves, which is to say, someone entirely unprepared to deal with the 21st Century world.

Sarah Palin's speech at the RNC seemed, to my ears, as if it were being recited by a high school forensics student. Apparently, that is not what was heard by the media and by the attendees at the RNC. It seemed at first, from the way they were talking, as if they saw a stateswoman up there. But that's not right, is it? What they saw instead was not righteous indignation against Barak Obama's community service -- it was complete bafflement over what the hell community service is supposed to mean. She alone had the audacity to display her absolute ignorance of the subject.

I trust this impulse in spite of myself. I'm voting for Obama but I have to admit the guy creeps me out. There must be something wrong with the really competent, I feel it too. Some professed inability to sweat. The crisis in intellectual politics these days is not that it's being attacked -- it will always be attacked -- but in the way that it defends itself. Instead of saying that there's no evidence for God, we watch Dawkins bend over backwards to prove that it cannot exist. We're proud of our incompetence because it's more sophisticated. Can Democrats do something about this? Is it possible for us to be honestly ignorant about stuff? Or will we continue to flail around in bursts of measured self-defense?

The Eugen-olympics

2008-08-19T11:34:00.001-04:00

Once again, Slate Magazine is at the head of the pack in giving a knee-jerk, pseudo-scientific-sounding eugenicist answer to why it is that one race is going to be good at something and why another is not. On Jamaican sprinters of West African descent who, according to a Quebecois study, had "significantly higher amounts of 'fast-twitch' muscle fibers": "So far, there is no evidence that even extensive training can turn slow-twitch muscles into fast-twitch ones, though moving in the other direction is possible." Huh? Should I get my forceps out, Slate, to make sure you've calculated "fast-twitch" muscle density accurately? Or else, can you add a maybe a little more context to your bizarre-sounding claims so we don't think you're a bunch of nutjobs? Then again, according to William Saletan, perhaps we'd have to be Asian to appreciate the full dimensions of what would seem, to the naked (that is to say, Black or Caucasian) eye, to be totally slipshod reportage.

More reportage along the lines of "we're just reporting what appear to be the facts" can be found here and here. For Slate's bizarre, not entirely disinterested, eleven-part "study" of what happened to babies produced by the Repository for Germinal Choice, start here.

Today's Five-Parter

2008-08-15T14:07:00.003-04:00

A few thoughts occurring to me over the last week:

1) The Russian and Turkish bathhouse on 10th Street is my new favorite place in New York, third in line behind Roosevelt and Coney Islands. I just discovered it (and so, says Alex K., "where have you been, man?")

2) I'm a little burned out from literary activities, but it was nice to read at The Happy Ending Bar last night, and to have relatively new stuff to read from, and to declaim it in the old way.

3) I've been struggling over a little 400-word review of George Oppen's Collected Poems, soon to be released by New Directions. The problem with reading him today is that he tried to make the modernism of Ezra Pound democratic, and though that's still a legitimate problem, it's not one we even understand today. Oppen's tradition has been picked up and mauled exclusively by professional intellectuals, which is to say, people who are illegitimate both in democratic thought and in aesthetic practice. He has no tradition other than the passively theoretical, and for someone who put down his pen for twenty-five years to actively organize renter's strikes, that's a shame. That no one sees that "silence" as being parallel to and of a piece with the physical work of writing is a greater shame. Theory does not explain Oppen's life -- nor any other life that's been lived well & justly -- and I fear I'm not a big enough man enough to formulate it in another way. I need a better tradition to explain my favorite artists.

4) SCTV was a hell of a lot funnier than Saturday Night Live. I guess I knew that when I was watching them on rerun back in High School, but the new DVDs make the case very handily. I wish I could find some video of The Gerry Todd Program to post here.

5) To The Hold Steady: more Thin Lizzy, less Bruce Springsteen.

New York living

2008-08-04T15:54:00.003-04:00

I accepted the invitation to take care of Artie (Artie's a very friendly pit bull terrier kind of dog) with a minimum of delay, because Artie lives in the East Village, just a 5 minute walk from the bookshop. That cuts my Queens commute down by, oh, say, 50 minutes, give or take the five. The first couple of days were bliss. Artie took to me right away, and walking around the Village with a pit bull in the clothes that I had just rolled out of bed with made me feel like some kind of a tough guy and a real New Yorker. But a tickle has plagued my throat for days, and this morning I woke up with a hacking cough and runny eyes: I think I'm allergic to Artie, though he loves me none the less for it. The little manhattan-sized apartment now seems close, very close, and I feel significantly less sexy for living in it. The upside is, I haven't had a cigarette all day, and I may just quit...

Questions for Batman

2008-07-26T00:53:00.003-04:00

Wow, Batman. Say you're the platonic soul who hasn't been to see a movie in twenty years or so, and you find yourself lining up with the millions to go see this bit of business. What to make of these batshit contortions? With the split personalities and the good-guy rich people and the excellent, unblemished public servants begging to have their faces melted off? What knowledge aren't you armed with? Isn't it likely that if you were a little behind the curve and turned to your partner and asked, of Maggie Gyllenhal's character, "oh, is that Batman's girlfriend?" or, "hey, why does she know Batman's identity when no one else does?" you'd receive a nutty non-sequiter answer like, "well, she was played by Katie Holmes in the last movie," as if that would explain her motivation for doing the things that she does. And, yes, Heath Ledger is mouldering in a box somewhere in a fair climate, which means, no Joker in the next installment -- a very important point, unless you had no idea what was going on. And is Two-Face dead? I can't tell. I mean, Batman survived the fall, so why not Two-Face? Oh, and why is this such a right-wing deal? Like, did they really have to have a scene which demonstrated the complete bankruptcy of voting on whether or not to, say, blow up a boat full of convicts? These questions will pile on in blockbuster movies in the years to come, I think.

What Have I Seen?

2008-07-20T23:15:00.003-04:00

I've seen Iron Man, Indiana Jones, The Incredible Hulk, Hancock, Hellboy 2, and now Wall-E. The latter started with a truly insanely racist trailer featuring chihuahuas who go from Beverly Hills to Mexico and dance around a Mayan statue singing a song about how fertile and lazy they are, or something. They still dance in my mind. You could tell the girl chihuahuas from the boy chihuahuas by the way they were digitally manipulated to walk (the girl chihuahuas all walk like Marylin Monroe). Wall-E runs around picking up trash 700 years after the end of the world. He watches Hello, Dolly! on a VHS tape at night. I feel duty-bound to point out that 700 years into the future, humanity has become fat: it floats in space on a massive ship called the Axiom (why?) and drinks protein slurpees and communicates entirely through these weird floating screens, and they just generally and very broadly satirize consumerism, the little babies. Wall-E doesn't judge them, even though he's developed a Hello-Dolly!-based personality. He so identifies with the little trinkets he finds on earth -- sporks, jewelry boxes, lightbulbs -- that he actually folds himself up and shelves himself next to them. And when fatty wants to make a political change (i.e. go back to the now black-lung-y Earth and sow seeds, farm, take responsibility, etc.) he has nothing more to do than push a big, green button with a picture of the Earth on it. It's like voting for Obama! I do love to notice these things, though it makes me sick. I'm still thinking of the way Harrison Ford's pants fit him -- baggily, like an old man -- and of the way he was still able to sprint gazelle-like, pants and all, out of harm's way. Or of Tim Roth's spine as he turns into the Abomination (I still prefer the way Nick Nolte turned into The Absorbing Man in the first Hulk, by doing that Nick Nolte blustering thing while biting hard on a thick electrical cable.) So many millions of movie dollars! How can I possibly go see Batman now? I'll puke, for sure. But I will, because my eyeballs are set for maximum absorbency right now. Batman will enter into their already supersaturated state and cinematic colors will run down my cheeks. I'll watch the trailer for The watchmen, directed by that guy who directed 300, and I will be instantly critical of that and of everything else, and said criticism will plug up my ears with golden wax, and I'll have to go get antibiotics. Yay collegiate America! Hooray for bursting!

Going Unchallenged

2008-07-18T14:07:00.001-04:00

Contemplating the notion that you may be (may be, I emphasize, because you can't reveal every fucking mystery in a blog) in love with someone who may love you is tiresome, from the perspective of keeping things alive. So the question becomes, what then? Write a little, sure, though it's difficult during this heatwave. Write for money, yes, for now, fortunately. Exercise, reduce, take walks and then shower. Check. Not really interested in catching up with movies -- I've had my Netflix copy of Knife in the Water waiting for me for a month, wrapped in its unevocative white envelope. So I play Audiosurf. It's basically a music visualizer that transforms whatever track you have on your hard drive into an actual, literal track upon which you drive. The beats become obstacles you either avoid or careen into to accumulate points. I'm not very good at it, but my high scores for Fleetwood Mac's "Walk A Thin Line," Burning Witch's "Warning Signs" and Steely Dan's "Razor Boy" have gone unchallenged as yet. It's the ultimate in anti-rockism, a pure adulteration of what music is supposed to mean. It actually gives the art form a "point," which is what every charlatan wants, right? I love it.

Worth Seeing for the Penguin

2008-07-07T13:36:00.003-04:00

I had no plans over the July Fourth weekend -- and no money, due to a regrettable dating mishap -- and thus, waking up to the lonely start of said weekend, and feeling a sudden, palpable dread of the void, I decided to take a walk. I packed a lunch and started down 31st street near Astoria Boulevard in Queens, all the way to Queensboro Plaza, then I hooked a right and walked across the Queensboro Bridge, picking up my pace as I went, staring down at the weirdness of Roosevelt island and taking in the disconcertingly vertiginous perspective of the cable-car tram from eye level (as if one could Jump! over to it...but no! no! you'd never make it...), kept walking until I got to Central Park, ate my lunch, fell unconscious for ten minutes near the duck pond. So once again that day I woke with the void opening up before me like so much grey industrial foam, like human sterilization itself, and what could I do? I jumped up and started walking again, deciding just at that moment that my destination would be the Film Forum, where I would see the held-over Herzog film about Antarctica, waves of white and blue cinema to battle the spreading grey, and so I walked through the horrid jumble of Columbus Circle and over to 9th Avenue in order to avoid Times Square and it's afterbirth, which is 8th Ave. I began to feel a little light headed so I had an iced coffee, and I walked until the blocks all registered like musical notes: bodega, bank branch, bank branch, deli, bodega, deli, bank branch, bank branch, duane reade, deli, bodega. Finally got to the Film Forum, paid my 6 dollar member's fee, had time to kill, went around the corner and got a Pabst Blue Ribbon (three dollars, leaving me with a budgeted amount of one dollar left), which I drank in blessed silence, trying not to think of what I'd do with myself tomorrow, just staring open-mouthed at the television as colors sort of swirled and popped on the screen.

Then I saw the movie. My verdict? Not Herzog's best, but worth seeing, especially for the insane penguin.

Bamberging in the Bamberg.

2008-07-04T12:44:00.006-04:00

When Oscar Wilde cautioned that, "it is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious," he obviously sided with the charming. Being a fairly tedious person (I write poetry) I can agree with the letter of this aphorism but not with its emphasis. Because isn't it true that, once some genius like Wilde sets the bar on charm, the effect afterward becomes merely inflationary? And with that inflation, don't the charming soon find one another and pretty much stay in that rarified company? So, yeah, charm becomes as superfluous as yachts. Sooner or later, perhaps even now, there will be but one charming person left in the world, an impeccable person who can communicate, in a type of preternaturally gentile super-language, to the three or four also-rans able to decipher her charming jibberish. (Almost all literary fiction, incidentally, aspires to this penultimate state, but never to the top spot. The reason for this? I think it's that novelists are proud of being able to explain the workings of these horribly afflicted, charming circus freaks to the rest of us, and because we sometimes, in our tedium, pay them for privilege.) The rest of us must distinguish among types of tedium -- bulimia, Democratic politics, hedge-fund-management, "interesting" sexual positions, bowling, the eating of pro-biotic yogurts, etc., ad nauseum. The charming are no longer capable of describing this world at all: only the tedious can speak with the prerequisite dull articulation. Except, it happened one time. One time only, as far as I can tell. This rare event was called Cosmos. It's a novella by Witold Gombrowicz.

I'll bore you with the set-up. The narrator, Witold, and an acquaintance met by chance, named Fuchs, meet outside of a remote boarding house in order to get away from the pressing concerns of family and work. Both men are so utterly tedious they find no legitimate way to occupy their time while on vacation. Lucky for them, the discovery of a hanged sparrow, a bit of wood dangling in a decayed bit of masonry, and a few arrows possibly (but not actually) scrawled on the ceiling send them out on a mission to discover their provenance. They closely observe the family -- a stout, tedious, fairly stupid middle class bunch -- for further clues. Witold, in his one act of heroism, gets so frustrated watching the married daughter of the family patriarch interact with her housekeeper and her husband -- so tediously attentive is he in his search for "clues" that a phantom sensuality begins to surround her -- that he eventually strangles her cat. There is a fairly uneventful suicide at the end of the book, but that's pretty much it. It's one of your plotless kind of deals.

Boring, yes? I can't deny it. But consider this: Witold is not really the protagonist. I mean, how could he be, since all protagonism in this novel is charmless and therefore un-literary? Who cares about protagonism among the tedious? So, then, I choose as my protagonist, my hero, (because I have nothing better to do on this July 4th, except maybe write a few poems) Leo the patriarch. It's true, he does takes a long time to reveal himself. The description of him comes early, at the dinner table. "Leo Wotjys was like a gnome. His head was like a gourd, and his bald pate, reinforced by the sarcastic flashing of his pince-nez, dominated the whole table." Leo hums constantly, talks wistfully and abstractly of the past, and lets loose a constant, thin stream of what the narrator calls "verbal monstrosities," as when he wants his daughter to pass him the radishes: "Pray papass to your papakins a radiculous radicule, my precious bulbul."

He is justifiably ignored by the narrator in favor of the unutterable minutia of his daughter's mouth, its particular ghostly relation to the housekeeper's mouth, the arrows on the ceiling, etc. Yet Leo comes to the fore now and again, humming his little songs and rolling up little crumbs of soft bread and lining them up in neat little rows. So far this probably sounds a little sub-Beckettian and you're probably right. It's funny like Beckett, themed like his work, and all written at just about Beckett's level (which, whatever, probably makes it top-notch). Yet Leo becomes more persistent throughout, hums more, suggests a family trip to the mountains. Once there, Leo starts humming like a lunatic, his hands start to flutter, he takes on an aspect of almost manic self-satisfaction. In sight of the mountains, he corners Witold and gives him something akin to a manifesto. It beginns with a word, "Berg," an utter nonesense word which immediately deports Witold to the back of the narrative, and he reacts with ineffectual anger, for "Berg" is the summation of Leo's life, a fully self contained system, encompassing even the narrator, a world in which tedious Leo rules with absolute authority. "So," says Leo, "you are a bamberger, then. You're a sly one. I'm a bamberger too. We shall bamberg happily together."

He elucidates by telling a story. "Once, while we were living at Drohobycz, an actress came to the town on tour, she was a superb creature, absolutely superb," he says (and here he's describing perhaps the only charming personality to ever intersect with his life, someone who, even then, one had to pay to see). He continues,

...and one day I happened by pure chance to touch her hand on the bus, oh, what heaven, what ecstasy, oh, to be able to start life all over again, but it's no good, you can't put the clock back. I felt bitter and resentful, but I ended by pulling myself together and deciding there was no point in wasting time thinking about touching someone else's hand when you had two hands of your own. Believe it or not, after a certain amount of practice you can get quite expert in touching one hand with the other, under the table, for instance...So, I can't complain, I have managed to get something out of life. If others have managed to get more, well, good luck to them.

His manifesto continues. "You can enjoy ourself like a pasha at the dinner table making little bread pellets...Epicurism, or voluptuousness," says Leo, speaking directly to Wilde, "can be of two kinds, it can be like a wild boar, a buffalo or a lion, or it can be like a flea or a mosquito." This is Bergery. I'll get nutty here and say that New York -- charmless, pleasureless New York, defined at every block by bank branches dressed up to look like nurseries -- is full of this bambergery, shameless bambergism. It began with the receptionist at the front of the cubicle block, with all of her little fuzzy-headed trolls lined up on her computer monitor and her teddy bear sweaters and bits of flair, but it has since spilled out everywhere, on the lips of those with liprings, in those disgusting Maori earlobe-holes the punks wear, in the "Gettin' Lucky in Kentucky" T-shirts worn by otherwise healthy-looking Midwestern college boys. Bergery exists in sideburns, flip-flops, Deicide T-shirts, vintage dresses with puffed shoulder sleeves. The five-dollar-bill now shows the Bergery of our treasury by taking on a purplish hue. New York is the epicenter of Berg, its pleasureless people, out brunching or fetishizing new bands with cute new sounds, its foremost ideologues.

I took a lot of pleasure the other day in helping out a pretty, fresh faced worker, a likely example (I see them all the time now that I've read the book), someone with the effronterous Bergery of an Obama pin tacked to the lapel of her grey business ensemble. Someone so white she had little pink blotches on her cheeks, as if her whole body were screaming for Bergism. She said she wanted something for a long weekend trip, and that the last book she read "and really liked" was Michael Chabon's "Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay." I suggested Cosmos to her -- "it's a little unusual," I said. "I think you'll like it very much." So triumphant and small did I feel at that moment, I did not even look back at her as she made her purchase and walked outdoors to the perfect little weekend I had designed for her. Cue fireworks, illuminating my face through the window as I sit home, contemplating the small.

Indulge me, is all I ask.

2008-06-29T14:43:00.004-04:00

Sometimes your buddy here at the Entertainment Industry spreads himself a trifle thin and puts into publication things he's carelessly edited. The trusting, kind souls at Stop Smiling let him get away with this often -- they have deadlines, too -- and so you will find in the latest, Gambling-oriented edition of that magazine a column of mine that bears comparison, grammatically, to scrambled eggs. Here is the correction to that article, which will soon appear on the Stop Smiling poetry archive. All I want is your unconditional love.

----

THE SUBTLE ART OF EGOTISM

Night Wraps The Sky: Writings by and About Mayakovsky
edited by Micheal Almereyda
Farrar Straus and Giroux, $27.00

I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose and Provocation
Francis Picabia, trans. Marc Lowenthal
MIT, $40.00

Every generation for which poetry isn’t a matter of mere diligence and hard work eventually comes around to Vladimir Mayakovsky. Brash, violent, mercurial, the greatest exponent, avant la lettre, of slam poetry (if poetry could ever be said to “slam,” Mayakovsky’s could), Mayakovsky herded his audience before many a public performance with a hush (“Quiet, my kittens...”) and then, while reciting poems of violent passion, theocide and weird bodily transformations, stepped aside every so often to outholler any and all of his numerous hecklers. And they were numerous. In his lifetime Mayakovsky acted as representative for the literate violence of the movement called futurism. As he matured, he lent his voice to the contentious rule of Vladimir Lenin. Yet he was loved more than any English-speaking poet could dream. When he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the heart in 1934, upwards of 30,000 people attended his funeral.

Filmmaker Michael Almereyda has assembled a new collection of Mayakovsky’s work, Night Wraps the Sky, in hopes that the Russian futurist will catch on in our own more meritorious age. Alas, we’ll have to wait longer to see a substantial new translation of this very important Russian author’s work, similar in scope to the 1970 Hayward and Reavey translation currently available. This will be, as my Russian-speaking friends tell me, quite difficult: Mayakovsky’s wordplay is uniquely specific to his native language and does not carry over nicely into English. So, though the new translations in Almereyda’s book do pop with life, there are far too few of them. Instead, this is a scrapbook. Memories of Mayakovsky’s life, pictures, and assessments of his legacy are presented here so as to carry over his passion to “shine through to the new tomorrow.” Admirers of beautiful contention will love this, and Night Wraps the Sky should whet their appetites for more.

Another of modernism’s great egoists made a comeback late last year in an exhaustive edition, handsomely designed. Francis Picabia was the self proclaimed “genius, idiot, funny guy” –- add to that, autodidact, reactionary, nihilist –- of French Dadaism. As a painter, he considered himself a rival to Picasso, and when he couldn’t paint, he wrote poems, aphorisms, manifestos and diatribes, all collected in I Am A Beautiful Monster.

Picabia, who flourished in the first three decades of the 20th century, seemed to demand from his contemporaries the respect of a 19th century bourgeois painter of the Ernest Messonier type (with all the roast beef that implies), all the while presenting a public face more or less like Popeye. “My head swells / enough to drive one mad,” he wrote. That swollen head of his got him in trouble with his contemporaries every step of the way.

His poems—tightly wound machines of invective and sharp imagery—feature the most beautiful illogic ever created in that most illogical century. He was also a very strong aphorist, which shows the influence of Nietzche, the only writer he read with anything approaching real seriousness. I find on one page: “It’s really only nonentities who have genius in their lifetime.” And on another: “Spinoza is the only one who hasn’t read Spinoza.” You don’t chew these little morsels without having to spit them out.

The translations from the French by Marc Lowenthal are a real triumph and give nothing to decorum. A shame, then, to find his rather decorous commentary throughout the book—often one will find commentaries wedged between every poem. It’s as if, having unleashed Picabia’s fury on his contemporaries, Lowenthal felt it necessary to qualify it at every step, and the attempt comes across as a little schoolmarmish, especially since Picabia does such a fine job of explaining himself. He once made a sandwich board and forced surrealist doyen Andre Breton wear it around: it distills both Picabia’s Dadaism and the essential conservativism inherent in that movement: “IN ORDER TO LOVE SOMETHING YOU HAVE TO HAVE SEEN IT AND HEARD IT FOR A LONG TIME YOU BUNCH OF IDIOTS.”

Battlestar Melodramatica

2008-06-26T12:57:00.003-04:00

Woah. Let's back up a minute. Battlestar Galactica is getting pretty stupid, right? No? Is it just me? You saw it that last episode, right? Like, the scene where Edward James Olmos, alone in his cabin, punches out the mirror, downs a bottle of space-whiskey and then (cut without transition) is found inconsolably weeping in his son's arms, in a scene edited exactly like a Warner Brothers cartoon? If you didn't burst into laughter at that point you must have ice water running through your veins. The show has already become pornography for those who really like to see military types saluting, weeping, or, preferably, both. But this was too much. Fine, I do get it. I do. Edward james Olmos is a good actor, he works really hard, and has been rewarded with a lot of bit parts. I can picture it in my head, how we came to this. Flash back five years. Olmos, fresh from walk-on parts in The West Wing and Touched by an Angel, gets a call from his agent:

AGENT
Eddie, I've got a regular gig for you. Okay, don't get mad. Promise you won't get mad.

OLMOS
I won't get mad, I promise.

AGENT
This could be a regular franchise type of thing. Regular work.

OLMOS
Give it to me.

AGENT
They're remaking Battlestar Galactica for the Sci Fi Network.

OLMOS
Oh, for Christ's...

AGENT
You'll be the lead, Eddie.

OLMOS
(Sigh.) What am I in this one, the Mexican space-drug smuggler? Or, what, the hard-nosed Mexican chief of the space-police? Just give it to me straight.

AGENT
Space captain, sir. You'll be the space captain, or general, or something. The boss.

OLMOS
Just send me the script. I've got to eat. Listen, I've got the one request..

AGENT
I know, Eddie...

OLMOS
I won't wear tights. No fucking tights.

WEEKS PASS

OLMOS
This isn't too bad. Lot's of dialogue, which is nice.

AGENT
And it's a franchise type of thing, potentially.

OLMOS
Let's do this.

TWO YEARS LATER

OLMOS
"Heavy is the head that wears the crown." What do you think?

AGENT
Great, Eddie. What is that, Shakespeare?

OLMOS
Fantastic stuff. Hey, you get any director gigs for me?

AGENT
Just Battlestar, but I'm working on it.

OLMOS
I need to direct. I've got to get in that seat, man.

AGENT
Genius like yours can't be put out to pasture, Eddie. I'm working on it.

OLMOS
Hey, what did you think about that scene where I busted up after finding out Ty was a Cylon?

AGENT
I'll tell you the truth, Eddie. (beat) I was weeping when I saw that.

OLMOS
That's quality television.

AGENT
You're not wrong.

OLMOS
I really felt it, man. I felt that one.

Bedlam

2008-06-23T00:49:00.003-04:00

Just saw Bedlam again. The Lewton/Robson team puts almost too fine a point on redeeming the lunatics in this, one of the last films Lewton produced before he lost his wartime pull in the industry. Lewton was determined, as he usually was, to draw a humanist parable out of the raw material of the horror film, and it is in this spirit that Boris Karloff, as Chief Apothecary Simms, represents archetypal tyranny while his inmates of his asylum represent, in almost Capraesque fashion, ordinary folks. They all have bunny eyes. It's Karloff's corrupt order versus the inmates' Romantic disorder.

Yet these inmates are also the monsters on the lobby poster, and as such they are contractually obligated to spring out of the shadows now and again and give the audience a jolt. You don't see their eyes in these scenes, just grasping hands. The horror/civics-lesson divide always gets a little muddled in a Lewton film, which is what's great about them and what turns them into unofficial Hollywood tragedies. Simone Simon, torn between her desire for her husband and her instinct to bite his face off in Cat People, is a clean, classic example. In the case of Bedlam, however, the tragic character is a voiceless mob, and the effect is pretty bizarre.

The climactic horror setpiece in the film, in which the inmates hold court over their tyrannical warden, is a neat set-up, one that echoes M and Fury and even Sullivan's Travels, yet with the promise horror films have that these films don't: that no lawful hand will necessarily come down on Peter Lorre's shoulder at the end of the movie and whisk him away, that no ingenuity or plot contrivance will get Joel McCrea off the chain gang. Yet there's no through-line in the scene in Bedlam, no empathetic characters, just two monsters, tyranny and democracy, pulling the moral of the story into taffy. You've got a guy screaming "cut him in half!" (entertainment!) over and over as the more principled inmates argue (humanism!) for his release: and, since Bedlam is a principled movie, all too much so in this case, this release is granted. Immediately after the inmates enact Roosevelt's Universal Declaration of Human Rights Karloff is (entertainment!) stabbed -- not luridly, almost gently -- with a trowel, and so the panicked inmates mortar Karloff into a wall. When, a few scenes later, the stalwart Quaker hero discovers the fresh mortar, he is inclined to say something about it, but the heroine compels him to keep his mouth shut. (Humanism! no wait, that's awfully pragmatic, isn't it?) "Why should thy hand be added to the weight that those people must bear?" she asks, eyes still large and electrified; she's obviously become unhinged from having been a forced inmate of the asylum herself. You expect him to do his UDHR routine and lecture her about the rights of all men, weak and strong, etc. No. He simply laughs, and it almost looks as if they are going to kiss as the Hogarthian end title appears on the screen. Weirdest scene in Bedlam: the only horror movie I can think of that ends with an explicitly stated moral compromise.

Another Late Night

2008-06-16T01:57:00.009-04:00

About once a month I find myself in that lizard-stem-driven state the internet inspires, where at two in the morning I'm googling myself and my friends and all my ex-girlfriends and the alumni of my old high school as well as weighing the merits of the greatest television cop show intros, looking up recipes for nostalgic, disgusting foods I'll never eat again but sort of want to, watching lizards talk bad about seahorses, or searching the Internet Movie Database for great but unappreciated minor actors and so forth. Eventually, and here's the point I'm trying to make, I wind up close to my vocation and wind up looking at poetry blogs. There are a lot of them out there, knitting away. Most of it is brutally out of touch and intellectual in the stupidest sense of the word: see if you can get through the following blog essay and its subsequent reader responses (or, really, any thread relating to the once-inspiring flarf movement) without wanting to take a long nap.

Still, names I know are mentioned, in rare instances I am mentioned in passing as reading with or having read with some more luminous name, and so I read, 2 in the morning becomes 3 in the morning, I find my hobby mirrored by the fruitlessly ambitious as a profession or a revolution (usually both) and myself actually caring about discussions of post-avant poetics or what is the proper motivation for innovative poetic strategy. At the end of it all I just generally feel as if I've been watching suicide porn for the last hour and want to lay down with my head beneath the water -- no thrashing, gently -- and die. In these perambulations, I always come back to two blogs, both of them a cut above the pack and both of them depressing, in their own way.

Joshua Clover's blog is interesting in part because his intellectual qualities are unperturbed by self-consciousness. He has a self confidence that can be profitably argued with, and an ability to reckon with the fact of popular culture -- the way it works, the way it sounds and feels, the way in which it is far more interesting than most poetry -- that bolsters even those ideological claims of his I can't allow myself to agree with.

Jim Behrle, on the other hand, is more complicated. Good luck finding the majority of his acidic little cartoons (Ron: "My answer to the boxers versus briefs question should be engraved onto the side of the Library of Congress" Curtis: "My thong is glistening with devotion!"), as he seems to erase all links to them as he goes along. The effect is funny, at first, then oppressive. The man is inconsolable -- to him, a crowded professional field is akin to apocalypse. For Jim, there are poets everywhere: poets spilling out of the cracks between the saturated wood, poets crawling between the tracks of the subway with the rats, poets of Zeus-like power observing him from the sky, poets serving their kids BBQ on engine-red picnic tables on perfectly manicured suburban lawns, and all of them have blogs, and all passionless, all watering down the sweet Coca-cola of the real with their bloviating. He's right of course, both about the number of poets (and bricklayers, and white-collar office workers, for that matter), and about their ineffectuality. But what does he want, for Robert Lowell to walk the Earth once more? Artists will never be great again, and I take that as a good sign. As many people as possible should play at art and sport, and should not bore us with their professional status or lack thereof. Otherwise, I can't see what politics -- or their weird proxy, blogs -- are for.

Gastropods

2008-06-11T12:36:00.004-04:00

Even after a small rain in Astoria the front walk is teeming with gastropods. It's like the wild kingdom. Snail shells ring the front arch like christmas lights, powered not by electricity but translucent pulsing meat. Slugs meet in the middle of the sidewalk, entwine, and leave a residue that look as if they've been liquefied. I step out and feel the little snap of their shells beneath my shoes. When the sun comes out the stragglers shrivel up like ancient worshipful cats, the kind the Egyptians used to put hats on. Am I within the five boroughs or an alien planet or what?

Desert Island Books

2008-06-09T14:20:00.000-04:00

Went to a great comic bookstore on Friday, before it got so friggin' hot out (97 degrees): Desert Island, out in Williamsburg. Gabe Fowler, the proprietor, has a really smart selection of stuff on his shelves, and Johnny Ryan was there to sign books. Ryan looked a little lost behind his desk, surrounded by his admirers, a gaggle of middle aged comic geeks who formed a wall between him and the good looking hipsters in attendance for the free beer. I believe some of them were on sale. Closed Mondays.

Dear Former Barnes and Noble Customers

2008-06-04T10:48:00.005-04:00

That Barnes and Noble over on Astor Place was pretty cool, huh? What did it have, three floors? Three floors on which to kick back, have a little breakfast, drink your soda pop, have a little snack of ice cream, crumbly cookies, etc. You could take a little nap there, right? A little nap in the Military section, using a pillow made from books on the fearsome Messerschmidt 262. I get sleepy just thinking about it. To ensure good blood flow, you may have even grabbed a fat stack of books on Raw Foods you got from the Cooking section and tucked them behind your knees. Woah, wait... Military? Cooking? Those aren't the same sections, right? No problem; they had employees to take care of that for you, wheeling their little carts around. Maybe you even had a crush on one of those little babies. Too bad it closed.

Now you're all coming into St. Mark's Bookshop, and we appreciate the business. Sorry about the legroom. Please, don't let it stop you from actually curling up right in our most heavily trafficked aisles. It's true you might find our business culture a touch unfamiliar at first. Most of us are hired on the basis of actually knowing something about the books we sell, and assume that our customers will need help in one or another aspect of book selection. We have a small staff and this keeps us pretty productive. If lately we seem a little derelict in regard to those duties, it may be because we've been focusing our attentions elsewhere. On small things. Like, for a long time we've had customers who could employ a few basic skills, such as standing upright, and alphabetization. This made them capable of reshelving books they'd pulled down without any assistance from us, even on some of the higher shelfs. No longer. Half our days are spent now cleaning up after our customers, tearing down little book towers with filthy Starbucks-cup spires and restocking them. Did I say Starbuck's cups? I meant also to say Pinkberry cups, Raisinets bags, ticket stubs, broken wine bottles, used tissue, half-eaten McDonald's hamburgers and splayed-out Village Voices. I guess those little diamonds-in-the-rough over at B & N used to take care of that for you, huh? College kids are great; they'll do anything. They're like coal miners except they vote for Obama.

Oh, and to answer your questions: 1) no, sorry, we don't have any books on Dreamweaver; 2) you'll find The Secret under New Age, in the aisle just past philosophy; and 3) our bathroom is in the back. You're welcome to use it as long as you can find a college student to come in and clean it at the end of the day.

Please come again.

Thanks,
The St. Mark's Bookshop Staff

Hey Bo Diddley

2008-06-03T13:01:00.003-04:00

Bo Diddley Bo Diddley have you seen
The wonders of this world got teenaged mean
It's gotten so I don't want to see a sight
But the king-like bodies puffing day and night
The king-like bodies tussle down the back
Of my yard to the No Diddley in Iraq
No Diddley No Money in the Bronx
Make a pretty-drumkit out of old timeclocks
Make a stratocaster from a cardboard box
Try to make a penny from a wheezily fox
Bo Diddley Bo Diddley have you heard
New York trains sound like mockingbirds
Chicago trains sound like killing cats
When they get together make a pitter-de-pat
Pitter-de-pat down the track it squeaks
And when it gets to Pelham man it's knees get weak
A meteor you know has got nickel to burn
Bo Diddley I think your nickels were earned
Tumbling through the sky like Daedelus's son
Bo Diddley don't it just look like fun
Put a Tungusa rabbit in a flashpop run
To make a fat impression for miles around
Bo Diddley don't you think it makes a sound
Bo Diddley Bo Diddley please relax
Rest a little while in your coffin box
And when you come back you can finish this song
When ground's all black and the rabbit's long gone
--1928-2008

Vipers

2008-06-01T22:00:00.000-04:00

2008-06-01T10:16:00.002-04:00

“Mrs. Clinton has instructed me to reserve her rights to take this to the credentials committee,” (Harold Ickes) may be one of the more depressing utterances of this campaign. I mean just the cadence of it, its perfect mingling of the imperial and the meritorious which pretty much sums up American governance right now. One isn't against credentials, necessarily, nor the committees that disburse them (well, I am, for the reason that credentials are in essence disappointing to those who depend on them, the human spirit being as it is sort of stupidly aspirational, but we'll leave that point for now). One dislikes that this is the idea, now, behind Clinton's campaign. Pushing on towards the void.

I am not absolutely convinced of Barak Obama's idealism--his selling point is really that he's a creative bureaucrat--but Clinton at this point is running a campaign of pure nihilism. First, she's for the disenfranchisement of the rebel states, now she's shocked (to quote Sen. John Yerkes Iselin) shocked! to think that those poor delegate's votes could be cast away. Which, given the electoral college, is perfectly fair. The system is unequipped to handle anything but unequivocal support of one or another candidate, and its weakness is to the advantage of anyone ambitious to ferret them out. We've run into its limits repeatedly over the course of this miserable decade, of which the Supreme Court decision of 2000 was the most damning example. We won't scrap the electoral system, because we're lazy and to do so would admit defeat, but to look closely at its reform would be to catch a shock from its ad hoc and undemocratic vibe. I admit Michigan and Florida had to be made examples for illegitimately shuffling their primaries around, yet still I sympathize with the impatience of their legislators. So then, somewhere in this morass, it was decided to award half of the formerly banned delegates a seat at the convention. On what precedent? Is it extralegal? Who knows? Everything's now being taken to the credentials committee.