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But By Friday He Was Dead

 

its gripping factuality, its humor, its emotional depth; playful yet profound

 

BERNIE

LARGER-THAN-LIFE

TALLER THAN MOST

 

 

AN AMERICAN PATRIOT

KILLED BY EVERYTHING

 

 

But By Friday He Was Dead (Subtitle: McRae's Journey), is a 64.000w, 220p modernist, literary gem. It narrates the deadly adventure of 3 rebellious Americans confronting our times in their own magnificent way before running into McRae, a U.K. foreign correspondent on the political prowl in New York...

Like cool, cascading water on a hot day this riveting read refreshes; it's so much more than an entertaining NYC tale. Without swamping the reader it uses a small number of global and historical parallels to dead-pan, dead-on effect. This makes the work a stylish microcosm of contemporary western life that includes high voltage intrigue and a culture clash, yet even if Manhattan gets described as America's throbbing phallus, it's really all about people. In fact, at its core, this is an honest and profound XXI Century individual character study that despite mainly tongue-in-cheek, subversive political overtones manages to slide into a masterful thriller by way of a slow subtle plot.

The principal cast: meet strong, passionate Edna, deeply committed to the charity for special needs children she operates from her Bronx brownstone home. She is what she reads and no prude who thanks to her deceased gangland father in speech often projects an unladylike side. Then again who gives a fig, there's sheer beauty beneath all the salty earnestness of a woman carefully re-educating herself! A woman with a lover even taller than her by the name of Rufus, an ex-welder who like most ex-divers could no longer hack always being alone on the job and later at home; a peaceful black activist and beast in bed, but devoting as much energy to the Harlem street youths overnight guarding his parked limo. A man hired by Bernie who by his own admission was twice  removed from reality and three times from four bars, yet a sharp as a blade towering little person and a far, far from diminished stock trader/philanthropist. An irrepressible pragmatist who not only sponsors Edna's therapeutic halfway house but puts the entire world on his tiny shoulders, with one additional dream for it's no secret he also wants to - in the way it gets phrased these days - take remarkable liberties with Edna’s knees...

One night this most colorful threesome bumps into McRae, a correspondent in New York to take a good fresh look at America whom they'll all try and sign up for their cause. He's Gibraltar born but with an American mother and concerned about the course her native land appears to be taking. But this dude's no Druid for modern times, for when criticizing he should equally worry about how he carries on.

A tragicomedy at its very best!

 

 

These are the opening pages of my modernist masterpiece. Let's see who first gets to recognize it...

                   

                    

But by Friday he was Dead

(working title)

 

                         

                            (subtitle: McRae’s Journey)                                                                                                      

                                        

                                                                                   

                                             By                                          

                                                                                                                                  

Anthony Steyning

 

 

December 22, 2022, draft

 

I

 

What's your name the pretty thirty-two year old with the elongated alabaster Nefertiti neck asked, mechanically flicking the ash off her burning Camel cigarette? She took him in with long lazy lashes and tired but not bedroom eyes uninterested as she was in applying for a missionary position, or anything of the kind…

It’s said nice girls may well pack a condom yet never a toothbrush or stay till breakfast, but this one also appeared to have precious little interest in hanging out alone! The place a high-ceilinged affair that the man she’d addressed instantly liked and matched her long dancer's legs, a graceful neck, black un-lacquered hair, angular cut cropped on the short side presiding over emerald green eyes that shone bright despite the subdued light.  It couldn’t get any better, a tall girl in a tall room in a low-cut dress despite the fact this lady may not be for plunging, but at least something and someone of interest he thought as he glanced at her hoop earrings and the rock as big as Gibraltar’s she rocked on one of her long fingers. The way this scene unfolded ultimately helping him respond to her opening line; a long dress and especially her stiletto heels making that despite the high room she still towered but didn’t intimidate as she’d selected the lowest barstool that she could find. And all of this implying that as far as he and the evening were concerned there’d been far worse starts and tarts and also confirmed that camouflaged character scars aside he was not the only one here displaying a somewhat exotic side. Now if only he could lighten up this knock-out, this peculiar face of the mocking half-smile, melt the tip and the tits of the iceberg, survive the occasion, maybe even get laid though despite or perhaps because of her operatic look a romantic Verdi Nile duet not immediately in the making! Then again it never does, until the curtain rises and the orchestra plays its overture, which like it or not and almost unexpectedly had already kicked off…

It was well after eleven, more people entering now, the night scene speeding up as she spoke, a shot of single malt Scotch or two and this lounge empress talking to him setting the pace, and yes, the whole thing a cliché, corny, but hey, she started it by speaking to him! Setting herself up by asking him who he was, a simple out of town dude in her opaque eyes probably the first if not the ultimate token sucker of the night. A gal no match for a guy hoping for some cute, slightly used, deeply desperate housewife on the rebound for as it turned out she was only a little bored, foolproof bull-proof and not exactly shy. After scrutinizing her McRae quickly concluding he could probably say goodbye to his halfie hard-on, that she was no hooker or some easy, unbearable lightweight, but possibly someone like him suffering from cabin fever the way a trapper in boreal Canada must feel cooked up in some inhospitable shack for too many days and nights. A place where winter hibernation is not only highly recommended for black bears but for all Canadians, and where a round piece of fur placed around a keyhole helps some poor jerk shivering in the dark at forty below grope for it key in hand or where once inside solitary confinement causes wallpaper to start showing non-existent palm trees, coconuts and naked exotic dancers in large yellow and brown water-stains…

Yes, yes, right here in New York, why not, by the looks of her and for all he knew in some digs three floors up, nights sitting in front of an outdated small-screen TV and ending up speaking like they do in dozens of noir movies she had to have watched. So he chuckled and attempted a shot at humor, trading in his carnal impulse despite her inviting and most enviable attributes. For had she had two handsome German weightlifters as bodyguards he would have remarked that she had an unbelievable set of Teutons, and possibly got away with it.  Though boys being boys he could still try seduce her by way of divine deflection: insisting she has beautiful eyes so pretending to totally ignore the magnificent bosom that she appeared to defend at all cost. But spotting something steely in those almond shaped eyes quickly made him enter into an almost celluloid, off-screen rather smoky dialogue with the woman sitting next to him. What the hell he thought, the whole thing no skin off his back, like water off a duck's ass as local parlance goes and with the firm belief one is casually sophisticated and well-mannered, or one is not!

 

- Hi! How are the molecules? I’m McRae! Nice dress!

- You like it? Just bought it… Second hand!                    

- You must be Dorothy...

- Oh my God, I’m doomed!

- Why Dorothy, you ask?

- Don’t tell me, Dorothy Porker? Am I that fat?

- Don’t be silly! No, you look more like….

- Dorothy Parker? Are you nuts, that was eighty years ago...

- So's that dress: eccentric, great...

- I'm Edna, if that's all right with you!

- Hello, Edna, you look both stunning and… utterly bored!

 

Some women don’t immediately own a room until they speak, at which point all their inner beauty comes out to shine. Others only glacially beautiful like a placid mountain lake and not just wide of hip but slight of mind, finding peace and small comfort in the past, always the past, while discussing manicures or something else that nobody in his right mind ever gives a shit about. Owners of a double-glazed mind through which they can see alright but no air comes in; or like an elegant, well furbished but regrettably unoccupied five-star hotel suite, though Edna beat this rap on all counts. A woman of solid compassion and character totally in charge it would soon become exquisitely evident; one not allowed to smoke in here, but who obviously didn’t care. Proving her point with a small, bone cigarette holder pointed defiantly at a black ceiling covered with zinc air-ducts and silver metal taped wiring, thereby daring the olive-skin, five o’clock shadow bartender and his interrupted shaving job, here, tonight, apparently in sole command.

A man from a place where the four-letter name Pepe is a diminutive for the four-letter José, but where not to make things any simpler they used to call him by the four-letter Pato, Ducky,  apparently waddling like one when he was young. Then again Jack’s short for John and Chuck for Chas, so what the hell? And she didn’t know it or that it would have made a difference, but she needn’t in any way to have worried about this southern light. Unlike Italians lyrically bursting out but making sense, his fate his people harshly erupting into spoken staccato, every second reassuring themselves they’re alive but exposing highly cluttered, chaotic minds by way of wind squalls of words. The Greek sage Plutarch translated into Latin already knowing all about saper ascoltare, putting his finger on the importance of learning how to listen when these folks have absolutely no time for a second wind or stealing third going straight to fourth in baseball terms, a home-run in the park, except one that very seldom counts for woe those who hear but never listen, never ask, never absorb!

The Sioux already pleading with the White man…Listen, or your tongue will turn you deaf. In this case the attendant ball crowd stuck in the stands aching to get the hell out, fleeing the stadium, making it home as fast as it can for once again while it’s said listening is the most beautiful thing one can give someone, this noble thought surely escapes far too many Iberians. Driving their many points home no matter what, leaving nothing to the imagination, verbalizing, spelling out, every annoying detail of what should have been a private life but also revealing a nil interior life. Like deconstructing Woody’s movies, not only repeating themselves 37 times and counting, but what once was frank and refreshingly honest all too soon becoming badgering by preposterous self-obsessed tripe. And so also a place where - as with this clarinetist’s Dixie gigs - celebrations for their own sake the national sport yet nothing to prevent anyone from walking away or out. Not only fleeing a scene, but soon enough flaunting every religious and city law on the way home by casually robbing a bank,  or two or smacking a lover across the face. Later that day still heaving an ornate sculpture of the Holy Virgin on wobbly shoulders down cobbled streets, fervently praying the heavy breathing and the sweat on one’s back didn't belong to the guy behind… taking his rapture a package too far!

Southern Spain where one venerates but also obfuscates and life never changes and hopefully why our barman did something quite different by jumping ship helped by speaking lousy English soon learning how to finally hold his tongue, stand up straight and work hard like an American. Far removed from that land of jails filled with ex-ministers, ex-mayors and ex-bankers; pillars of society who instead of remorse express stern anger at getting jailed for ripping the public off. Or where debt chasers knock on doors dressed like Fred Astaire in top hat and tails, forcibly collecting and publicly shaming a sobbing widow or some other sad case… Now, ain’t that some dance!?

All of this making it clear why this errant anarchist disguised as barkeeper didn’t give a solemn fuck, letting her smoke when this was highly illegal. Or for that matter surprised people who knew her well and therefore quickly understood why she frequented this strange dive in the first place. No taboos here yet not set up like some tobacco Blind Pig or some other copy-cat, hello-suckers speakeasy behind a door with a hidden peephole; that training ground for doormen as aspiring gynecologists and without a doubt the running but dated local gag... This time a house with a dude-in-charge non-American probably moonlighting, not naturalized, not part of the national DNA, no parents’ or even a grandparent’s Doris Day, Danny Kaye kind of mind. Decidedly never having had a gal in Kalamazoo, seen Bobby Soxers, Zoot suits, Doo Wop crooners, Zippo lighters or other such well-way-back memories for him to fall back on. His only claim to experiencing a slice of nostalgic Americana – on his day off hiding from a rainstorm - watching the in his eyes stranger than strange long-legged precision dancers at Radio City Music Hall. Like any tourist finding refuge in this theatre where he unexpectedly discovered this chorus-line of beguiling Rockettes for him to later enthusiastically carry on about to anyone caring to listen, probably lonely after finishing work and therefore also his certain cry for help.  Every day in doubt whether to return home or hang around hoping something special in America would profoundly change him, make his life come around. End up belonging, blindly adhere to sometimes adolescent rules and attitudes that no longer had much to do with his accent or where he came from; as if some dude from Poughkeepsie or maybe as far away as Tucson.

 

- Do you come here a lot?

- I don’t know, you tell me!

- Strange place! Man, this guy serves some spine-chilling drinks! What's that you're having?                                                                                   

- A Daiquiri...                                                                      

- A what? A small, Cuban lesbian?

- Yes, frozen in time…You're a howl, McRae! I had to run into you!

- Speaking of frozen in time, ancient Egyptians believed that cats have seven lives...

- Always thought it was nine!

- Me too! But anyway, that on their seventh reincarnation they turned into humans...

- Does this have anything to do… with anything?     

- You look like Nefertiti…

- Who’s that?

- An ancient, drop-dead Egyptian queen!

- THAT old…?

- She was a timeless beauty!

- Fantasize all you want, I'm not a cat!

- But human?

- Ah, that's for you to find out!

 

Forgetting that according to lore both Schrödinger’s cat - or his dick for that matter - could be dead and alive at the same time and often pretending to prefer dogs over humans just like that famously cranky old Greek Diogenes, he had to admit about her he might be dead wrong. She was cool and strangely distant even though she had asked him for his name, which didn't quite jibe. He thought he’d napped a couple of hours, so an hour and a half probably, that made him feel fine and energized, but also hope that as far as subliminal advertising goes he hadn't ordered some useless lawn mower or a thong; only getting that respite. But respite from what one might ask, suggesting that right this moment he's for someone like Edna to figure and sort out and she by someone like him, the way if carefully listening to her she had implied.

 

- So, how come you're alone?

- Who says I'm alone?

- Why else would you ask me my name...?

- I'm so much more than one person…! I often dislike myself: bored, boring, predictable…

- A second one of you doing the asking right now…?            

- Something like that! Does it matter a lot?

 

During the day cats pretend to be domesticated, but at night they go out and assassinate, and if they were the size of a lion they would kill you on your own front lawn. Dogs the only really tame ones, for obvious reasons deeply worried about deforestation or a lack of fire hydrants, come evening retiring early and if they could… putting a pair of pajamas on. Centuries ago and on the neurotic side Montaigne already asking… when I play with my cat, how can I be sure my cat isn’t playing with me!? And while she’d said she was no kitten she sure played like one, with McRae as her mouse and lucky at that for the two of them. Yes, the luck not only hers but also his, certain places at certain hours suddenly coughing up people like them. Men and women making the most of  things by killing boredom with mystery, no time for pre-obtained rights, certain privileges or stale regrets. So he didn’t want to start by asking whence she hailed only to get some evasive answer like the Panama Canal, or Alaska perhaps. At which point he probably couldn’t resist joking if she was one of those frostitutes he’d read about, a street walker from below-zero Juneau or Anchorage looking to heat up on a hot, off-Washington Square sojourn where in this erstwhile mechanical-bull and waiters-as-rodeo-clowns last-chance saloon they’d just met. This former urban ranch hootenanny turned into electronic heaven a stone's throw from Wall Street and the New York Stalk Market where they’re in wait for you. The geography where on the outside and here on the inside turbulence meets turbulence, rip tides cleverly disguised as insouciance.

McRae taking a quick look around with eyes that had already seen so much then thought all those in attendance represented the new times, appearing to be in desperate need of what can only be described as the hypnotic life. Every side of them incarnating the new century, dressed in neon bras, lit up by strobe lights. In here no smell of defeat, not yet, too young, but one of total detachment; so no euphoria, not even by the glass! On a small dance floor towards the end of the room a lone couple grinding out a dance without as much as touching hands or cooing sweet nothings up each other’s ear. As for the rest only subdued bar talk, no Bartók or a semblance of the chaos of the city in this place, but what struck him most no real hope either as muted cell phones shone onto lounging faces bobbing to repetitive chill-out strains coming from nowhere.

 

 

Etc Etc and before Bernie bursts onto the scene.....

 

*********************************

 

FUTURE PROJECTS

(Don't steal, give credit where credit...!)

 

I have 2 more novels up my sleeve: A dramatic love story about a man deliberately setting out to turn his wife against him because he desperately loves her and knows she deeply loves him. But she's 15 years younger and he foresees that the day he'll die will leave her heartbroken and so wishes to spare her this agony by slowly making her come to resent him, the ultimate act of love...

 

The other story one on a sneak love theft during a large public calamity, called: Under Cover of Chaos! About a man in a warzone plotting to steal a neighbour's pretty wife by anonymously denouncing her husband, having him not only arrested but eventually executed. Then patiently console the greaving new widow, conquering her over time with her slowly coming to think Who is this wonderful man who by miracle came into my life? Until....

 

 

*******************************************+

 

   Sunset Prospekt

     (Of Chandeliers & Quiet Vitriol)

 

She’s imperious, she sulks a lot, she has a great dramatic past, she used to be loved and admired by millions but has been in limbo, stuck in a time warp, great in theory only now left behind somewhat. Her mansion is vast, her mementos full of dust, her gardens need work and her servant used to be married to her, he who opens the door to her self-loathing new lover and killing him should the visitor show her no respect.  

 

The posturing of anger, of madness, of passion, she a living shrine adored perhaps not for herself, but for the very need to adore by some needing badly to belong. For when deep down one’s the subject of contempt, one pre-emptively out-loves, pretending the lady doesn’t know what she’s doing, her denial and dismissals an anomaly needing to be corrected, even surgically if necessary and should that fail attacking her doctors of course.

 

Sounds like Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, doesn’t it? Well, perhaps it is. Featuring Norma Desmond, the jaded star magnificently played by Gloria Swanson, attended to by Max von Mayerling, her silent, vaguely satanic butler and ex-husband brought to life by Erich von Stroheim, who keeps a close pulse on the failed writer Joe Gillis played by William Holden, caught in their net by accident.

Yes, it’s Mother Russia that I’m alluding to, the Urals Queen Bee to her jealous lover, the KGB (FSB), protecting her, killing her with kindness, feeding her delusions, forging her fan mail, murdering for her, ignoring her mind and heart, profoundly convinced only it knows what is good for her while keeping her locked in and up. The obscure and violent romanticism on the part of people appointed by her, paid by her, those servants from hell, but the professional incest palpable. People who look like Boris Karloff, faces like dogs, though more recently sleeker, on the surface kinder, even elegant, yet still chafing under suspicions brought on by those ancient, inbred complexes of theirs. A national layer of super-patriots in and out of uniform collectively called Max for the sake of this article and making it so nobody in that nation is really, really in full command.

 

Can you imagine her? Can you see her striking out, yet also at herself, lice deeply embedded in her pelt? That is Russia! And where they come from, nobody knows, but certain national characteristics seem to develop as if the germ of them is lodged in local drinking water. Of course, you could blame it all on the indiscriminate terror of Czarist police over the span of hundreds of years, but paranoia and heavy-handed reaction to it seem ingrained in the national psyche and Czars or not, must have slowly started with the people themselves, because everything always does. Including the very rejection of them, this rejection having taken place in other parts of Europe, terror reigning in most of Europe most of one time and originating in many corners, in many areas like in Robespierre’s France, Cromwell’s England and under Ferdinand II’s Holy Spanish Inquisition, but none turning into the type of cruel national fatalism and paranoia Russia exhibits at all levels, right up till today.

.

 

And why Russia reminds me so much of Norma, and the KGB (FSB) of Max and Joe the would-be but forever-menaced lover perhaps portraying the West, saying 'She used to be Big!', provoking Max's timeless retort 'She still is! It's the World that got smaller!'

 

 

Competent democratic Socialism as a legitimate counter weight to savage irresponsible Capitalism, as in any true Justice system restoring accountability and balance, is vital. But when you hear the words Revolution, the People, Social, Liberation delivered by Faustians baring gifts and often wearing uniforms, watch out! They'll kill you or throw you in prison simply by disagreeing with them!

 

 

Dreams Reformed, History Re-thought

 

Updating harsh, archaic, revenge, retribution thus retaliation-based western Judeo-Christianity through the occcurence of Christ, and again later again with the Reformation followed by a Renaissance culminating in the Enlightenment, its arts, literature and the beginnings of modern philosophy, was the result of slow but advancing moral growth.

Proving that everything is to be re-examined, spontaneously re-thought and transformed after the piling up of excesses and indecencies applying to all religions, laws and courts, capitalism, socialism, certain industries and in some cases the entire fabric of a nation.

 

But where are the truly wise, well-placed and ever so honest and courageous..?

 

ISLAM

Islam or the issuance of a license to assassinate, an all too often not so dormant mandate to kill with a blessing from a sanguineous God… But how to begin to free oneself from the prison of sad and unforgivable textual passions?

 

 

- Do I show you my Assisi, St. Francis asked?

- Please don't, she replied, it'll shatter your halo!

 

ON ETHNICITY AND THE LIKE..

 

It's wrong to be identity-classified, but it is just as wrong to use shared norms and experience as a coercive weapon.

Solidarity makes strength, but also enemies when leading to arrogance and exclusion.

For one shouldn't have copied attitudes based on herd-opinion followed by predictable expressions and decisions.

Loyalty and mutual acknowledgment are one thing; individuality, character and outreach another.

 

Graham Greene had no truck with so-called U.S. Imperialism, but toyed with Stalinism and loved Caribbean dictators suggesting they were all ultimately its fault. But then he disgracefully overlooked that if it weren't for those evil Yanks a Swastika would be flying over Buckingham Palace until this day as America, no one else, saved good old Albion and ironically his entire career...!

 

I lost my shirt.... Oh, sorry, I lost my verse in San Francisco....

 

I really like Ferlinghetti and what he stands for, but when he writes

I am waiting

for the last supper to be served again

with a strange new appetizer

he should have left it at that, because in 3 lines he brilliantly says it all, and therefore not continue with...

and I am perpetually awaiting

a rebirth of wonder

which completely ruins it for me

 

Oh, and I'd change his Coney Island of the Mind, into Demolition Derby of the Mind

 

 

Here's a fragment of my Fairy Tales essay:

 

All of which reminds me of Peter O'Toole, one of our finest philosophers, whose favorite greasy, wine and whiskey stained jacket could no longer be cleaned and was sent back to him with a Dry Cleaner's note saying Item Returned To Owner In Unimproved State, a wording he so much loved that he said he would use it on his tombstone... And why not? For if so many behave like pets perhaps they should no longer speak of their Maker, but of The Owner! And with this lively anecdote only to say that yes self-deprecation and humility are fine, but self-humiliation not so much.

 

PLUS

 

Stream of consciousness doesn't get to the point because all too often there isn't one while real rivers have both destiny and destination with no need to talk about themselves

 

Baudelaire as in Buenos Aires

Poète maudit. Not just cursed himself, but nonetheless on the satanic side. Breaking with VICTOR-HUGO-style epics

dragging us into ugly, sometimes spaced-out urban existence including all of its lowlife street-life, its booze, off-sex, and death! In other words one of us, a regular kind of guy, no flowery garden scenes or cathedrals for him.

Plus he liked POE, the macabre one, also a bit off, translated him, even looked like him, died early like him, now that’s solidarité...  

 

Before him Diderot, my kind of guy

 

Then, what the Foucault!

Knowledge = Power. And power is control, but not always malevolent! ( Like for instance a forced Covid vaccination!)

Humanism always politicized and leading to Stalinism, or the politics of untruths. Of course, of course, in the way that generosity and empathy always lead to cancer!

 

 

As for Jean Genet...

Like Capote, gay, obnoxious and short with indisputable writing talent, but managing to market himself to the literary establishment for being 'repugnant yet despite everything.... dazzling' ! With some of his life story true, but an awful lot of it brutally fantasized whereby lying beautifully becomes something that we must admire?

For gays don't go to sea to be locked up with 40 straight guys aboard a ship for weeks on end, they much rather become Christian Brothers and Midget League hockey coaches so that stealing from and blowing sailors in Barcelona probably is a tall story. Cab drivers maybe, as real sailors will massively frequent Putas, not Putos like him.

Yet unsurprisingly Cocteau and Sartre fell for his lines, big time!

(The following from my Twitter Account in response to a massively overwritten John Gray critique on Genet's life:)

 

On Vagabondage and Literary Chic

 

‘By embracing his own evil he would become an authentic individual’: Who? Jean Genet? Or Adolf Hitler?

‘ Harsh Gay Virility = Pride’ or Jean Genet, Marquis de Sade and Sacher-Masoch all rolled into one?

'Crime erotic to him': How to picture this? He got a hard-on when pulling off a heist? But then how did he get through the door?

‘To be is to be perceived' , but mainly applying to attention seekers like professional (literary) contrarians, non-conformist shit-disturbers (literally), and other con men.

 

‘Without disapproval he is nothing', so making sure that black is red, wet is dry, hot is cold, evil is good, betrayal not only ecstasy but supreme honesty, all the while claiming that no child is innocent and wicked like him so a good excuse not to have to take responsibility... All of this appealing by appalling, a technique perfected by Celine during the same years, one whose flame of infamy still burns all too bright.

And in Genet's case morphs into

'Short, clever, ugly, wronged, involuntarily cruel, but adorable!'

No wonder Sartre loved this bird!

Same ilk!

 

On Artaud

 

Don’t know why Antonin Artaud called it Theatre of Cruelty; Theatre of Deliberate Distraction would be more appropriate as it lured an audience inside stage action to make it feel it were ‘there’, drawn in like fawns to a headlight with the use of sound and light effects and if necessary the smell of farts...

(Though yes, this is somewhat cruel!)

 

 

On Theatre and the Cha Cha Cha Man

 

Ancient Greek tragedy doesn't pit individuals against one another in daily life situations, so no personal conflicts, accompanying psychology or anything else quotidian, everything Delphic, epic, heroic, administering applied mythology and bits of noble history along the way. But then this diety addiction was followed by a diet of staged royalty addiction wrapped in Shakespearean language, or England's obsession with inbred Kings, Queens and many, many Witches, Omens and Ghosts caught up in ridiculous plots as if nobility were all who mattered, that if and when they existed at all.

 

And oh yes, of course, then there's modern American drama as in Long Day's Journey, the Salesman,Who's Afraid Of, Streetcar or that Iguana exposing deprevation through a depressing brand of realism, a pre-occupation with and preponderance of the mentally and/or morally wounded or otherwise disturbed, as always drenched in copious amounts of booze. This twinned with continental European existential theatre bringing down all those gods, demigods and monarchs, but creating a void by letting many hang mid-air, thinking... Right, so now what, where do we go from here? The point that even postmodernists find emptiness everywhere because they are empty as someone once wrote.

 

For isn't too much made of agonising, alienated, aimless modern man living without passion or purpose when millions find perfect happiness and justification for living in dancing the cha cha cha, driving a new car, or hundreds of thousands of times carefully roll a piece of rubber into a hole or else hit one into or over a net? I see these folks and listen to them every day and while not admirable in any sense they do appear to be just fine and think of ultra-modern playwrights as incomprehensible frauds who don't know how to live but get admired by pretentious snobs...

 

So who's right? And why? In a situation whereby the outcome is still the same, sharing the same destiny what we got, at peace or not, nauseated by mortal combat with vacuity and oneself, or not? Whereby perhaps the time has come to turn the tide once more, return to relevant very specific, earthy not neurotic universality and if not to the classics or constant class conflict at least to classier more uplifting, less depressing, totally surprising and revealing, truly entertaining rites of stage.

 

BUT HOW TO SNARE THIS HARE?

 

Debauchery as Cure

A Rake's Progress, both the paintings and the subsequent opera, The Beggar's Opera, Lulu and The Three Penny Opera

were all created by sincere moralists posing as immoralists

You know, those naughty lads Gay, Hogarth, Wedekind, Brecht and even Stravinsky...

 

 

 Gide, the French writer, suggested that by the time he's in his fifties a real man should have had syphilis and the Légion d'Honneur, though not necessarily in that order. While Brecht, the German playwright, acidly asked Why be a man if you can be a success? And speaking of the horse's mouth: he should know; by all accounts old Bertolt was not much of a man, but in his day a great success.

 

It appears Hemingway was the Donald Trump of XXth century literature, his own wife writing that his making up for being such a loathsome man took great genius.

 

What's In A Name?

Of course Agatha Christie could never hide from me that Hercule Poirot was not a Belgian, but a crafty overdressed Englishman from Bristol named Harry Leek. And neither could Florence Cockatoo, changing her name to Nightingale to give her noble pursuit more luster. Or else that Thom Chapman, or was it Thom Guybloke, became the much romanticized Larry of Araby...!?

 

KAFKA IS DOROTHY

 

 

Just found out that good old Sam Beckett, the Buster Keaton of Anglosphere literature, was a bit of a scrounger making him even more human of course

 

“God damn you to hell, Sir, no, it’s indecent, there are limits! In six days, do you hear me, six days, God made the world. Yes Sir, no less Sir, the WORLD! And you are not bloody well capable of making me a pair of trousers in six months!” (Tailor’s voice, scandalized.) “But my dear Sir, my dear Sir, look – (disdainful gesture, disgustedly) — at the world — (pause) — and look — (loving gesture, proudly) — at my TROUSERS!” (Samuel Beckett, Endgame)

 

Well and properly appropriated from this much older Yiddish joke:              

 

A traveller, arriving in an east-European Galician town orders a pair of trousers from a local Jewish tailor. Three months later he leaves town without the trousers. After seven years he happens to pass through the same place again and, lo and behold, the tailor comes to deliver the trousers.

 

“ ‘Well,’ the traveller exclaims, astounded, ‘God created the world in seven days — but it took you seven years for a pair of trousers!’ ‘True,’ the Jew agrees, quite unimpressed, ‘but look at the world, the shape it's in, and now look at my trousers, how perfect they are.’ “

 

Tut.. Tut.. Sam, mon cher ami, and there were 7 weren't there not 6 days according to deep lore!?

 

-Plus: Beckett's ugly beauty: When he opens Murphy with the Joycean, somewhat awkwardly phrased yet beautifully poetic The Sun Shone, Having No Alternative, On The Nothing New.... he admits that, by itself, the sun shining also has nothing new, so that what we have here is the Nothing New shining on the Nothing New, and not so much a reverberation, as perhaps a lazy start.

 

Remembrance of Things Past is a lousy translation of Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu in that all things remembered are in the past, making this a tautology. In Search of Lost Time is only slightly better as search and loss are mutually implied with 'lost time' sounding like a factory problem. The latter also has no rhythmic quality whatsoever, and why I would settle for Of Days Time Forgot! But then whoever came up with the simple movie title Time Regained hits the proverbial nail right on the head

 

Vladimir Nabokov thought of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice as an extremely asinine piece of work. It’s the story of a morally confused older chap infatuated with Tadzio, a pretty 12 year old boy. But then Volodya went on to write Lolita, which is about a morally confused older chap dangerously infatuated with a pretty 12 year old girl.

Personally speaking I dislike any work based on an unhealthy passion or on an untenable premise, no matter how beautifully it's crafted and even when supposedly meant as a grand metaphor. In the end literary merit must rest on what is said, not on how nicely things are put, the brilliance of emptiness.

 

 Large parts of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos sound so much like Vivaldi, his contemporary, it's uncanny! So who stole from who, guys, and by which conduit? Musical scores by intercepted Pigeon Post? Or simply a priest and a church organist claiming the same divine inspiration?

 

O, the day the Valkyries will lie me next to Sergei Rachmaninoff in Valhalla

(N.Y.)

 

(I mean the Norse ones, not the fat, shrill ones that Wagner created)

 

 

***************************************************

 

 

I juxtapose to expose, or else to re-enforce

 

- First, learn how to spot them!

- Pardon me!?

- Then connect them!

- Spot who, the what?

- The dots, you fool! The dots!

- Oh, them...

Hope is like the electricity in the rabbit's Duracell battery

 

Yet, cruel human stupidity also forms part of the miracle

 

WE DON'T ASK ALL THE QUESTIONS

 

Tribalize = Trivialize

 

Defamation = Nameslaughter

 

Pinker is no Spengler, their odeurs clash

 

She wore success acquired by wearing not much of anything else...!

 

It takes 1 robot to replace 30 workers. It takes 30 workers to build and service 1 robot. It's not the machines that are getting smarter, it's the workers.

 

Schwarzenegger doesn't translate into Blackadder, but into stupid Baldrick's Austrian love-child...

 

I worked in the Golf property market once with my German partner Dick Wagner, we sold many Tannhäuser on the Lohengrin but then ran out of turf and epic fertilizer

 

Dear Ms Rand, please tell me it was all a bad joke, that it Ayn t so...

 

It seems it is not Marxism but Facebook & Twitter that cause the hollow end-victory of the proletariat

 

With figurative or classical painting the art lies wholly in the hand, with the abstract totally in the eye: the precision and beauty of nothing

 

 

With adjoining front doors on St.Catherine St. in Montreal a street level burger joint called Steerburger sits right below a Strip club on the building's first floor. So that each time and after their burger a bunch of guys walks out, the upstairs doorman invitingly holds the other wide open and mumbles: This way, gents! Dessert?

 

Canadians are cold fashioned, but warm hearted

 

On Mordecai Richler: 'Twas the bastard Davidoff, and his pal Old Glen whot got a damn fine writer and an exquisite man!

 

Overheard with my pitoune at Else's on Montreal's plateau, about an innocent question to a 97 year old man in an old folks home:

Sir, what is your favourite pastime?

Replied to with the delightful, Jewish snark: Breathing!

 

-Giovanni, who wrote Hamlet?

- I thinka his name wasa Piece Acake, or Chesapeake...

-They named a Bay after him?

-Sì! In America!

 

 

- WHORES DON'T MOAN...

 

Did you pack your fruitcase, honey?

- My gay pal William who works for NATO in Brussels brags that each time he travels to Washington, he stays in a Five-Star General. (He doesn't like Rear-Admirals, particularly in choppy seas)

 

- Woe, begun! What strikes me in nature is that prey never fights back! No anger, no indignation, something that I would call unbearable equanimity, and acquiesced brutality also common in parts of the human world. For is it normal to go gentle into that not so good night?

- I'm a friend of hours

-Gravity, that tireless sculptor of flesh and earth

 

THE CONFORMIST

    Magnificent! Nearly every frame a study in camera composition. I wish I could paint like this, in prose!

 

- Some will kill to belong, even when what they believed in vanished long ago. Conformity and addictive nostalgia compulsive, or the thrill of doing something significant even in theory, simply too strong for small minds? (Moravia/Bertolucci, the film)

 

- During her worst moments, the hours of profound loneliness, the elderly widow would grab a mop, turn it upside down, put on a tango, and passionately dance it through her kitchen, over and over again. No, not her last tango, and definitely not in Paris.....

 

Espermatozoïdes Caseras no es un filósofo Griego

 

- During an interview David Foster Wallace refers to "The reality I live in...", indirectly admitting there are other, in their totality larger, by definition more important ones.

 

 

A Dog Named Dylan

(push full screen button for extra canine effect)

 

 

Rage

Man should neither live

like mole afraid

of darkness,

nor as someone’s slave

‘ been given

sight.

Only taming himself

by feeding not stealing his other,

raging at injustice

and at day’s end,

 any held out

false

white

  night   

(now if only I could find a bulldog to record my Rage poem)

 

-Goethe, one 'good' old German, said he'd take injustice over anarchy anytime. But he didn't live under Stalin, Hitler or in someone else's police state. Where order remained the greatest injustice of all,  dictators early on slipping into moral autism, creating their cruel, their idiotic thugocracies.

- My doppelgänger is made of anti-matter, he rides antelopes, eats only anti-pasta and drinks anti-freeze. He is a semi-conductor who leads the orchestra half of the time, I do it the rest of the year.

.

I’m not sure if like anti-matter there’s an anti-Christ, but evil and destruction seem to prefer to travel from East to West, like an anti-sun

-Godard equates age with space, as in: How much space have we left?

- Or as in: Time is the space one needs to reach someone else!

- The President of Brasil noticed the solecism of the Carnaval dancer, not wearing anything underneath her miniskirt, inviting her up to his tribune, then up to his palace, en-suite up to his private chambers. She wasn't around when he was forced to resign.

- The super-collider people have a point. This morning my neutrinos made it to the bathroom before I did.

                      

- I've added at least twelve poems to my collection, please scroll down under Selected Poems and check them out!

- You're in trouble when you think you're lying on a porcelain-white beach, a stone's throw from azure water, taking sun, when it starts to pour, and you look up into the suddenly grown-dark sky and all you see hanging up-high... is some damp, curly hair and two pink slices of roastbeef.

- C'est Emmenthal, mon cher! (Elementary, my dear?)

- Waugh, be gone!

 

Rangoon Night

(2009)

 

When

Between two orders

of rotten Sushi

Aung San Suu Kyi

deliberately

sings

Auld Lang Syne

                                                                 off key

I drown

sudden sorrow

in shoddy local Sake

And before

New Year's Eve's

slow Burmese death

So

should

She

 

Last Call

(revised)

 

A lush

and sultry

evening

A mist

of shadows,

a veil

of Blues,

a breeze

of fine,

white breasts,

in semi-darkness

A

low-cut

down-dress

waitress

loathing rush

and hushing,

making

leaving

slow

and

most

reluctant

As

that

late

night

beguiling,

she

the stage

Not

the

Act

 

Exactly what happens to me. Struck by a luminous idea, invariably told that I don't know what I'm talking about...

 

 - Rococo was Baroque's Dadaism, Postmodernism nothing but Neo-Retro, then again everything's Neo-Retro! And this is not art-wank!

- Poor bastard, always grabs someone else's convictions, and when they no longer work, steals another one! (See the Charlie play)

- The Veneration of St John the Fascist (See the Charlie play)

- When asked about the stunning shape I'm in, I tell them mornings I do a full workout including weightlifting, afternoons topped off... with a little shoplifting.

-Read about Tape's Last Krapp, in Waiting for Beckett (Essays)

- The man having the genital transplant was fondly re-membered

-Sorry, Pound and Eliot! I don't like poetry needing translation back into its own language. Deliberate high-brow obfuscation, go eschew yourself!

 

-The Axeman Cometh

 

                                                                    Café De Pilaren

 

The natives would reclaim their sacred watering hole after the tourist season had rolled by; Bergen a pretty village on the coast where everyone knew everyone. Intrepid tourism could be an oppression imposed in summer, crowding all roads! For only in winter they can tell exactly who’s entering, at precisely what time and in the way the old door knob gets turned after the frontdoor gets pushed open, then closed. Hesitatingly, firmly, softly, or impatiently, with timidity or aggressive abandon, followed by the immediate certainty what old tale will again be told, out of a collection of only six or seven heard or overheard a hundred fold! Beforehand everyone knowing which drink will get ordered and imbibed, by whom, the bored waiter always bringing a bill in the same amount, paid precisely two hours on. So that in spring the invading masses are welcomed back with a certain predictable relief, gratefulness prevailing despite the foreign tongues, the loudness and the shouting clothes. But why go to Bergen at all, let alone live there by the sea that most no longer saw? Only that door knob, not loved but feared if not by all apparently by most?!

             

**************************************

 

- Oh, go practice onomatopoeias!

- Oh, go fondle yourself!

 

-The Spanish writer Manuel Alcàntara puts it this way: Somos un pueblo estupendo para la pesca. Si tuviéra rio... ( We, the Spanish, are a nation of terrific fishermen, if only there existed a river!) ( He said it, not me. But the fleet is large!)

 

 

***