writing by accident

Yesterday was one of those where I committed a scene without meaning to.  I was writing something else, hacking bits together--  in this compositional phase of a script I refer to this as "roadwork", where patches get steamed out & fitted into a sequence  --when a morbid thought hit me.  A morbid thought adacent to personal experience.  So that was given room to grow, and next thing, three extra pages.  Going to hack at that today.  THE KILL HOUSE is now at 56 pages, pre-formatting & editing.

Some of "writing by accident" is discipline.  Write a little every day, whether intended for posterity or greater purpose or just farting around.  Eventually bits happen, whether intended or not, or accrete material as a result of scale & gravity, and next thing one knows:  writing.

In the midst of the unplanned Bit, comedic instinct appears.  Gestates, as the lines are honed, then breaks the surface of the roadwork.  Now these bits have to be shaped.  Line edits happen.  Read, re-read for flow.  The Bit has become a Sequence.  Toward the end of the sequence, unbidden, a joke flowers.  A pun, sobconsciously conceived & thrown into the mix.  Too much?  Or just right?  Where did all these jokes come from, anyway.  Weren't we just writing something serious?

This is where it's most important for me to trust instinct.  There was no outline, but there's a rise & fall to the action & dialogue, one I can sense the shape of now.  The verisimilitude I'm after requires human response, and a vital impulse in this craft, I've found, is making room for jokes.  Leave room for response.  The jokes grow all on their own.  Some of it may be the Editor's Mind, taking shots at the Writer's Tendencies-- the editor, with his red pen, can cook like it's open mic at an improv club  --but then there's the Writer, who's just trying to break tension with the Three Stooges (my Script Idiots, known as Motive, Plot, and Post-hoc Justification (patches plot holes)).  The writer just wants to sit all his little freaks together in the front row and run through the lines.  He didn't set out to make a big production out of it.  He needs his creatures to co-habitate, profitably.  The quickest way is to get 'em giggling.

I keep writing horror, because I've experienced enough of my own to need an outlet.  Part of writing horror is needing breaks to vent tension, deflate things, break it down and build it back up.  So there's a lot of dumb comedy in my work, and it would (I'm confident) be considered surplus to considerations in terms of page count or runtime.  But it's my shop.  I'm the letterer, too.  So I get to do whatever I fucking want.  And mostly I don't want to run a by-the-numbers, Serious shop.  I want to keep it moving, keep it organic.  The only way to get there, in my experience, is by trusting Accidents.

i know things about chicago

and it doesn't require an audience.  anymore than the things i now know about chicago require an audience.  i see a lot.  always have.  it's a runaway thing.  having my degraded vision restored by glasses makes it possible to study an entire nightworld which, for a decade plus, was receding into fog.  chicago is a marvelous vista in the dark, the vast accordioned silhouettes with their rave-pastel windows grown from obsidian coral, and the roustabout gloam below, with its shadow circuits...  i go chasing police torchlights and trolling nervous patrolmen, who can't seem to find the crime they're after.  returning i see:  swift as cliff swallows cruising cyclists stop and organize a threeway with a willing benchsitter, kneeling as i pass.  the giver presses his right hand on the kneeling recipiant's shoulder, signaling not to stop, as his riding partner traces the small of the giver's back from latissimus dorsi to heavy rhomboids.  the trio pick up the pace as i leave them in dark tangles of overlaid park bench slats & inky whispering eruptions of brush, and i think of the thin young thing who preceded the threesome-- sauntering with the lip of his pants tugged beneath his iliac crest, signifying with his eyes and sniffing loud.  men like them number in the unknowns, as infinite as the number of nights that have incubated in this centre of teeming industriousness and accomplishment, as up against itself as it is against the elements

i can't say i know these people or know anything about them:  but i know me, so i can extrapolate the endless varieties of explanations, and i know need like few may imagine.  it's decent material.  the stuff from which life is built, though it's rarely said as plainly and openly as these minor demonstrations.  chicago never sleeps, like some aquatic mammal alternating autonomic activities between lobes of the brain; forever in motion, negotiating currents and avoiding obstacles, as some fathomless aspect of itself dreams deeply of kindnesses alien to light and the smoke-reddened eyes of john and karen q. public

on the other side of the smudged chalkmark of the horizon, in ontario, there is fire.  i do not know it, but the fog that has seeped between my eyes and the dim beach is thick with toxins.  the air has taken on a pervasive flavor of dried, salted meat.  a trio of friends-- two dykes and a skinny male  --caper in the tide, and i balance my ass on the steel cable guidewire in the center of the pier, sketchbook angled on my knee toward the floodlights.  felt-tip nib dancing in imitation of life.  tomorrow (yesterday) i will have a cough, and a persistent flavor in my mouth, and my chest will feel heavy.  tomorrow (yesterday) i will worry about the way the particulate count has shifted the refractory index of light toward the red, and how the vacant beaches echo high desert.  (yesterday) the next day i will wear a mask, and curse myself for heeding the call to adventure, and the seven-to-eight cigarette hangover coating my lungs; and the-today-after [earlier than now] i will contemplate the couples swimming, heedless of the white and khaki film of ash scumming the tide.  i will not speak to these daytimers, maskless, dapping their cans of coca-cola together, who cannot see the flaccid, eyeless, carrion-white bass with the hole torn in its back, lolling against the rocks.  death does not require an audience.  merely opportunity.  it will occur to me that these maskeless daytimers should be warned, but-- surely they were.  i know things about chicago.  and so must they

us

 

& our 60 new friends

the burroughs folio: kammerer (1) dots & lines

Back to the OCD.

Line placement is key.  So too balance.  The first rendering of David Kammerer did not go well.  I got impatient with my own process.  This time has turned out significantly closer to the mark.

Brushwork next, INKluding fills, then lay on the tones.  This is the fifth of the eight portraits.  First in the actual series, as it will be printed.  I'm pretty close to satisfied.  I'm hoping the bubbles look right...

the lit bit - july 2o26

Dhalgren (1974) - by Samuel R. Delany

Figure this took more or less the same amount of time to read as my first go-round.

Overall, it feels Unlocked.  I get where Delany was coming from, and what the materials were, and how he mixed them.  Cruising was a huge turn of the key-- once I realized that this story of metamorphosis opened with cruising, it told me not only who the narrator was, but where the hunting grounds were.  

Obviously one part of that Big Answer was The 1970s.  The readership for this book, as I imagine it, was in two discrete parts-- the Delany fans, who were championing youth, intersectionality, and an adventurous imagination; and the closeted readership, who were not (I am fairly sure) exclusively cisgender nor inexperienced.

We queers had kind of emerged, in the wake of sexual liberation, but we weren't entirely accepted or understood by our communities, and so a great many of us were D.L.-dormant or selectively closeted.  A lot of us were eager to be seen, but the realities on the ground were... not dissimilar to today, really.  Bisexuals and non-denominational freaks were (and to a greater or lesser extent still are) The Queers to the "strictly" hetero- and homosexual spheres.  There's a lot of gatekeeping in the gay & lesbian communities-- a degree of it is necessary, to screen out sketchy creeps & users  --but there's also a component of that mentality that is inherited, or adopted, from the straightlaced.  Because when everyone is telling you what your spirit & body are ALREADY telling you ("Sex is sacred!  Sex is vital!  Sex is integral!") only they're using borrowed & purloined ideologies & terminologies, well, those Good Intentions are actually chaff, being thrown into your affairs, just to fuck with your radar.

I don't believe anybody is 100% anything besides themselves.  Everyone travels their own road, and arrives at their own conclusions.  That is not a comfortable conclusion for the majority of us, particularly those of us who would like to believe the best of our fellows.  We don't want to believe there are Users and Bad Actors among us, stealth agents for the christo-fascist agenda, weirdos who harbor genuine concern over caucasian birth rates.  Perhaps we do not want to believe this because-- whither utopia?  Perhaps because we crave the notion of a people unified by charity & largesse of spirit.  If humanity is, as we queers so wish to see it, a calculus-- a process, not merely Of Change but Of Being Changed by process --then the terms being definite (or not) are part of the equation.

Perhaps the unchangeable, the normies, the straights, the idol-worshipping dotards, are always going to be with us.  Perhaps America-- the Mythic america, the Idea of america, the Sales Brochure cannily folded between the bars of our cribs, the america of potentially incalculable virtue & barely choate utopian instinct --is the greater problem.  Because it isn't just religion, or capitalism, that's the bug in our program.  It's the fundamental bullshit that blinds us, literally.  It's the fundamentalist tendency.  The one that's addicted to false binaries.

America is THE land of false binaries.  Two parties, two genders, two polarities.  Rich & poor, blessed & accursed, high & low culture.  We carry these notions of Absolute Good and Absolute Evil everywhere with us and (intentionally or not) slather these assumptions all over.

We particularly treasure being able to use these assumptions--  whether it's Rebel Forces versus Tyrannical Empire, or Invisibles versus Myrimidons  --to construct alternate Americas within the greater geographical confines of this thing we recognize as society, on this continent.  Consequently there are as many Americas as there are sub-genres of science fiction.  There is america for the law-abiding, and america for the criminal underclass; america for the wise, and america for the deplorable.  America the beautiful, and america blackpilled.  American pastoral, and america-built-on-bones.

But, to return to Science Fiction...  America perhaps most resembles that.  America most definitely is a fiction, and its nature, as an evolv(-ed/-ing) nation-state, is absolutely indebted to science.  America is wedded to a certain idea of process, and believes that process-- let's call it capitalism --to be synonymous with Progress.  America is vast, and in its vastness there is a foolhardy tendency to believe its resources inexhaustible.  Science fiction was one of the major social indicators, over the 50s, 60s, and 70s, that ingenuity, adaptibility, & a knack for invention were proof that we Knew What We Were Doing.  No science fiction, no space race, right?  And space was the place we were going.  We were going to take our successes, as one nation under god, indivisible, straight the fuck over that final frontier.  Fer shure.

Now let's retrench to Delany, and Dhalgren.  Because the science fiction in this book is a fiction about sciences, social & practical.  Sex undergirds ALL that-- point of fact, Delany seems to be saying rather explicitly that sexuality IS the science whereby we may understand ourselves.  Sexual chemistry is the engine of growth in the artificial heart of urbanism.  If you can't get along with your fellows, you can't co-exist, let alone propagate.  And since the advent of psychology as a science with a little 's', it's become axiomatic that sexual identity is a fundamental component of the human psyche.  There are more sexually aware, and active, people in major urban centres than anywhere else in the country.  It's not just a numbers game:  it's how things Actually Work.

But of course cities train humans to exist within them, therefore American cities teach their inhabitants to be schizoid about their desires.  Our educational system is not, contrary to the pledge of allegiance, indivisible, nor under god.  Liberty & justice are at best tertiary concerns to the fact that this shit is Too Big To Fail.  And that's what urbanism was finally starting to do, with the advent of the 70s:  caucasians were realizing their racial caste was imaginary, but they weren't necessarily waking up to it, whereas non-caucasians were wider awake than had ever been permitted; women were realizing their power need not be limited to interactions with men, and the realization was starting to make the greater masses of men shit scared; and the queers, darling, were realizing themselves.

I know, blah, blah, blah.  I do this every time.  I talk about a book by not talking about the book.

(At least this time, not by talking at bible length about myself.  Much?)

The big concept of Dhalgren, to me, is that Delany realized american urbanism was a science-fictional state, and that living in a science-fictional state, in a major metropolitan city, stresses & reshapes the sexual individual.  Cities force change.  The modern american city, at the time of Dhalgren's publication, was in crisis, with infrastructure breaking down, racially-charged rioting, and scarcity being accelerated by (purposefully gamed,) asymmetrical systems of commerce.

How do you find unity within that?

Why, you find it by looking for it.  Maybe you find it by asking your neighbors.  Maybe you find it by accepting a name, or rôle, or position.  Maybe it was already there, waiting for you to seek it.

Dhalgren is, after all, a quest novel.  But perhaps a unique quest novel, in that it asks whether the quest necessitates a hero.  If the quest is just going out and getting laid...

Yeah, folks, I'm not getting to a Final Point with any of this maundering.  Dhalgren is a fascinating little thing.  It can be infuriating, even.  The text is unstable to the point of disintegration, and interminable if you're short on patience (or just not fond of logic puzzles), but it's brimming with self-awareness and a real zest for asking Why, Goddammit, Do You Think It Has To Be This Way.

I don't believe in the great american novel.  I think the great american novel is a rosy bucket of balls.  But Dhalgren is definitely one of the great lowercase-'a'-merican novels.  It does so by breaking the definition of science fiction as being stolidly Science-y, it restores sexual honesty to the generally muddied and messy state of city (& communal) living, and it asks, over & over again:  "Do the categories matter?"  Do the classifications apply to you?  Are "you" who You think you are?  And what is that, exactly?

Dhalgren is exactly nothing.  It does not contain every possible variation of every possible formula for what can be; in fact, it doubly refuses the Joycean dead-end of Ulyssess, with its white male hero(es) in their eternal peregrinations in a city whose imaginal limits are determined by colonialism & cultural "wisdom", because it neither requires nor accepts ANY SINGULAR INTERPRETATION as a genre work.  Dhalgren is not utopian, dystopian, or even queertopian.  Dhalgren is, exactly, no-thing.

Dhalgren is Bellona.  And Bellona--  goddess of war, leveler of cities --is the greatest american city that never was, viewed from within the event horizon of its author's experiences in Great American Cities, viewed from as many angles as may be found within its borders.  These are plainly marked, if one may see through the fug of words to perceive them.  There are multiple points of view, and multiple bolt-holes through which to See, what Dhalgren is about.  And... ultimately?

It's problematic.  Its problems are america's problems.  They are not American Problems, exclusively.  But they are the terms by which Delany's equation may be read.

Which solves the puzzle well enough for me.

What's it about?  It's about 801 pages.

The Vampires (1971) - by John Rechy

A sadean exercise in "satanic" excess that turns into a tedious psychodrama real fast.  Opens with some genuine descriptive verve & some nice phrasing, but by the end it's all clipped stage directions and obvious dialogue so I'm not sure why Rechy wrote, or chose to fluff his Grove Press portfolio with, this.  It's pointless except as some sort of harebrained moral fable.  Also, excess of incest.  Pass.

 

Hamster Dam (2o18) - by Quentin S. Crisp

 

Hard To Be A God (1964) - by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky

the mytho-literary calculus of considering cruising ÷ the dérive = a night journey, or, i am why you hate blogs

(sundry notes regarding queertopian artfaggotry)

panel to panel transitions have been less on my mind as i work increasingly ONLY in single panel images, no longer concerned with greater page or presentation, those variables having been ruthlessly determined to be fixed & beyond my artistic control, so no more really fucking cute games involving page layout or movement of bodies (or directed flow of dialogue) at diagonals intersecting with the Focal Points of BLAH FUCKING BLAH.  the panel is the Non Submersible Unit, just as the sentence is the emotional core of the paragraph, to entirely misquote gertrude stein, bless her dead ass.  you work on each panel equally; no panel takes priority.  every panel is another part of the story.  the only one that was a Big Deal was figuring out the very first image.  once i had that, the rest was flow.  the script is very interesting to me right now as i build it; there's a renewed sense of surprise & invention in the moment-to-moment of my experience as i write.  when the characters surprise me, or do something other than i originally intended, it's always a treat.  when it occurs in an erotic context it's especially intriguing to me, as i generally don't consider myself that inventive or horned-up enough to write Pornography.  sex is a very Literary thing to me, as it's an internal-- or perhaps most aptly --interior state, a state of Being: "outside" of (the bog standard linear perception of) time.  sex is also an artistic thing, a preoccupation bordering on obsession, in how to present it in my art without looking like more of a weirdo than i already am.  i feel judged enough on all number of things:  actually putting my sense of sexuality out there & cojoining it to my artistic impulses, that requires raw courage of the average joe.  i'm not average, or normative, in a great many senses; not because i have outre tastes or behave like a weeaboo-- like that even matters anymore, living as i do in both a culture, and sub-culture, that's too far gone in jerking it publicly to judge nothing ol' me for my dull hangups  --but because i haven't had the experiences (or built up the bank of experience) that the majority of gay men have.  mostly i haven't had the opportunity, or the physical, sexual courage, to celebrate my body or my desires the way most queers my age have.  i have limits, and my hangups are to do with my face.  i want to be exhibitionistic.  i want to be proud of my body, and to show off, and to feel Present and Real in my physical being-- to be myself.  but i can't, because i have the Wrong Face.  i'd like to have pictures taken of myself, to be in videos, to be a cute little freak like all the other cute little freaks up and down my beach, to hang out with my equally fucked up friends and be vain and do the selfie thing and talk endless drama about how hard it is to have a good time and still earn a living selling underwear and whatever...  but i'm not that, and i think that's all well & good but also my brain never shuts off unless i'm fucking or making art or lost IN art or bicycling or maybe exercise, yoga, if i'm lucky, so i can't check out and pretend people give a shit how i look or particularly want to fuck me anyway because i have the Wrong Face.  so i spend a lot of time window shopping, daydreaming, and writing little erotic "skits" that ultimately get refined into parts of stories.  i think they're smutty but i also believe they're good writing for the kind of story i want to tell (ultimately, a positive one), and honest interpretations of human experience.  so yeah, i dunno....  judgy old queen writes litporn instead of giving in to a lifelong urge to behave like a hedonistic ho.  newsflash, or something

point being, thinking about time, pacing, presentation.  the beats of the story.  the music of the experience.  because sex & musicality aren't--  though dancefloor culture would have you believe otherwise  --exclusively driven by beats, and time is queer.  time is queer, in sex, and in how time expresses itself through art; time is a suspension, in comix:  each unit, each panel, considered as a "whole" moment, an integer of time, is a Monad, the nucleus of the atomic circumference of the greater story:  so too is the Self whole, in the heightened awareness of sex that comes from being both embodied and outside concern with restraint or convention or table manners.  not to get all wittgenstein but the world is all that is the case, and if you're in the world, and in the moment, it's all about balance, ultimately.  set, and setting.  i know i overthink shit and i yammer and nobody cares but this is what is always happening, and it's why i make art, and comix, and it's why i blog.  because otherwise these would be the substacks NOBODY WOULD READ, because who needs to read my pseudophilosophical daisy chains anyway.  *i* don't.   (i just keep compulsive notes)

somethings i write in notebooks like this, and brother, the typos would make samuel delany wince because at least he had dyslexia as an excuse

anyway.  where was i.  oh yeah.  the panel.  i spent a long time thinking about dick tracy, this past winter, and it all comes down to the panel.  that box is a microcosmic unit of perfect potential.  i get why the modernists were obsessed with its structural utility.  i've spent most of my life thinking about little boxes, what to put in them, and what order to put them in.  i've gone through a lot of notebooks.  and i'm never gonna be done with filling 'em.  i have been haunted by sequences of squares my whole life, almost as much as i've been haunted by lettering.  i have a pattern seeking mind.  and the panel:  the panel IS the most powerful thing there is.  it can be a page, or multiple pages at once, even as it may only ever be but a sliver of story.  there is an awesome malleability to what may be done with it.  i don't know if i recognized that before my recent meditations on chester gould's art, and comic strip art writ large.  i believe i knew it, that it was in the fundamentals of my toolkit, but i don't believe the fundamental Facts of the art had explained themselves to me, before indulging my OCD and studying the shit out of dick tracy for like four, five months

incidental to that insight, i've always had a fixation on the comix page as being analagous to the architecture of the physical space in a story.  of it being an architectural cutaway of a building, or the dimensions of the panel conforming to the space of a stairwell.  it's a Will Eisner stagecraft thing.  my favourite frank miller comix make use of the conceit.  everybody lauded the hawkguy comic for doing it, everybody loves it when frank quitely does it...  it's a real boss move, taking the little boxes and using them to capture the feeling of bodies moving through a Lived Space.  you see where i'm going with all this stuff, right?

the erotic potential of cities, capturing life in little boxes, putting it all on array like windows in a building and building the story pane by pane, glimpse by glimpse.  lighting the windows the right way, so you can find your way back to them, to stare in again, and marvel at life & how it is lived, in all its curious detail

i'm nearly done re-reading dhalgren, and it's been extraordinarily useful to me, on the heels of rereading 'the screwball asses', in re: the whole queertopia thing.  our experience of society, and of social spaces, and natural spaces, and shared spaces...  all very much on my mind.  plus i have this whole Very Gay beach right next door to me, and the lights tend to be off in the park a lot.  the city has a lot to say about the human condition beyond being horny, of course.  but it's nice to recognize the positive, in life as much as in art & one's experience of it, and i have not spent nearly as much of my fifty years on this planet as i would have liked, being happy about being a gay man, and liking men.  men have not done much to make this world pleasant, these past fifty years.  i find i empathize perhaps too well with the amoral Kid at the center of dhalgren.  i get where delany was at when he wrote it.  he was very conflicted about the world that produced him.  i do not feel dissimilar.  but i do find joy in this life: an extraordinary amount: and i believe i have found the means & the medium by which to express it.  which is also where i think delany was, when he wrote dhalgren (and the book(s) that dhalgren contains-- beause, as a container, it refers to notes towards a modular calculus, which is a structural conceit within delany's corpus which contains all of neveryon + trouble on triton).  

boxes within boxes within boxes

(it just ends there)

shutdown(s) & selling wolf tickets

There will be times this blog is deactivated.  If it's not here, it will be back.  It will always be back.

Currently on deck:

• HERO OF THE FEVER--  a queertopian sci-fi soap opera Infinite Scroll style webcomic --is in process.  Debuting soooooooooooonish.  Don't crowd me.
  
• THE BRIDGE OF MANIPULATIONS will be published next year.  It's a comic.  It's a tarot card set.  It's my life's work.  It's true!  This is the place to peek at it.
• DENIZEN, a bio-comic chronicling William S. Burroughs' involvement in the Carr-Kammerer murder case, is working.  It will be serialized as a webcomic, aimed at print.  With any luck I don't get sued.
• THE AZURE PANTRY, a dating horror graphic novel, is also on the slate.  Maybe it'll run alongside DENIZEN.  Maybe they have things in common.  Maybe?
• THE KILL HOUSE: an extremely meta vapor-comic which queers some Image Comics / Wildstorm / DC comics characters everyone's forgotten.  A military adventure thing with conspiracy frosting!  And sprinkles!
  
• and, as ever, there's PAINLESS, which was meant to be my attempt at a Disney money cash-in, but now it's dead bottom of the deck.  Who doesn't love a bootleg Wolverine yarn?  Besides copyright holders.

to wound the autumnal

Cities, cities, cities.

There's a lot I don't talk about.  Mainly because it makes people uncomfortable.  I do that.  Easily.  By talking.  Most citizens of the you ess don't want to talk about material reality.  The incalculable, mountainous waste and its (arguable) redistribution.  The inhumanity & the conditioning required to maintain it.  The filters we are not born with, these blinkers-that-do-not-blind, which we inculcate in the young.  I've seen it all--  though, not like Waits, not exclusively --through the yellow windows of the evening train; through silver rain and jitterbugging snows; through piney carnage adjacent to the tracks, in pressboard lean-tos toppled by police order; through the narrow angled concrete armpits of overpasses, overlooking the topographic impasto of leaves, flattened to-go cups, and silver plastic pouches ground together & mixed by the witchy hands of seasons, zephyrs and storms.

Like Dane McGowan and Austin Osman Spare, I've seen the wildstyle murals in the living rooms of the invisible, and found them beautiful.  Like them, because "real" & Not; like them, because pale & forgotten; like them, because barely the main character of my own life.  (Parasocial cretin!)  Like them, because I am quite unlike anyone I've ever met.  People rarely admit to being truly lost, let alone admit to homelessness as a semi-constant in these inconstant States of amnerika.

Cities are where I live, eat, sleep, and think, and they are where I have done most of my Time on this prison planet we call North America.  They're where I've found sufficient bits to collage together, to approximate the Human Suit which camouflages the inchoate ugliness of my psyche.  Cities taught me to write.  I write because it's easier than drawing.  Because even though I'm worse at writing than drawing, drawing takes more time & concentration, and the elements do not always permit it.  Sometimes the elements are environmental-- the noise and weather of bad emotions, of barroom chatter, of human imposition and resentment, of bodily complaint  --and sometimes the environments are elementally cruel and careless.  Drawing and painting are high concentration, whereas any fucking fool can blurt a sentence.

I've yet to form a sentence that accurately captures what hell is.  Much less bliss.  Cities are both.

Yeah, homelessness is part of everything.  Class neurosis.  Like the anxiety over brain damage.  It's inescapable.  It's part of me:  I talk about it / I don't talk about it.  Like being queer.  Or being a half century old.  I don't expect to be listened to.  I turn my ears off too.  It's all very inelegant and tiresome, and it tends to not have a Point, because it is a chronic condition of this life we are, we say, acclimated to.

Do you want to hear about it?  I don't.  I have been homeless several times.  Had "phases" of it.  If a 'phase' may be terrifying and interminable and a hidden stain on one's will to power thru Life.  Because, in the long view, cities have been my salvation as much as they've played purgatory.  Cities are the counterbalance on the scale of justice, for me; when I fled the countryside and the wilted flower power entrenched there, the failed and fractious past that is the american South, I found the future-- not in science fiction, but in the science fictional state OF city existence.  It is not natural.  It is far from nature.  In theoretical practice as much as reality.

But what is nature?  At the end of all this.  It's the rat with one eye who bounds from beneath the crumpled rear fender of your neighbor's Uber, to stop at the concrete bumper by your feet, to rise on its hindlegs and sniff, as if to say "Fancy meeting you here," before fucking away to the evening's routine.

Samuel R. Delany does not entirely capture this state of grace, in Dhalgren.  But he gets right up on it.

That's all I have to say, today.  You don't need to hear the rest.

nightmares & how to ride them

Just part of the game.  Your body can be at ease and your mind can be placid as a lake when you arrive in bed and you can still wake straining to wake, shouting and tossing and unsure where you are.  It's normal.

Sig never remembers me waking that way.  Generally.  He's so forgiving.  Also, too sleepbrained to register it happening.  He'll check on me, ask what it is, then entwine his fingers with mine, and it's okay, and he's out.  It's enviable.

Me, it'll take twenty, thirty minutes to unclench, get my heart rate normal, ease the muscles.  Thirty minutes at least, if I decide to write the offending 'mare up in the journals.  A trip to the toilet.  Some breathing exercises.  Once all the thoughts are arrayed and the thing examined, it's fine.  I can sleep again.

But it's hard to remember life before Sig was there.  The nightmares were a facet of my Life Before, living & sleeping alone, years at a stretch.  Then it was just get up.  Do some exercises.  Take a night ride on the bike.  Write it all out.  Read the old journals.  Then stay awake until whenever.  Sometimes all night, sometimes until work the next day.  Rest was a thing that existed in parings, trimmings, snippets.

Today sleep isn't the enemy.  My subconscious isn't the enemy.  There is no enemy.  "Enemy" was only a game my brain was playing with my instincts, a preparedness drill...

It's okay, buddy.  You got out.

an inverted monolith

 It's always postgame here at the Echolocution desk.

 

So I'm re-viewing Backrooms, back to front, for no reason other than boredom, really.

 

This was worth watching in the theatre, mainly for the sense of scale.  Without the Big Screen, this could easily be a webisode.  What I failed to pick up on, when we watched it, was the truly subtle shit.  Like the Kubrick.  Not the Shining references-- that's as on the surface as the overlay of the Red Room onto the Backrooms.  No, it's the Monolith:

The monolith is all over this thing.  And not just the implied dimensions of the hole in things that the Monolith represents--  the monolith, inverted.  Look at that top shot, of the abyss the door is perched over, and the stairs leading up.  That's this 2001 shot, turned inside out:

 

No naked vacuum of space above, no structurally sound archaeological dig & secure ground below, and a sadistically ordinary household door with a petflap, lording over it all.  That's a really, really wildly interesting inversion, to me.  Because it says something and it's mute, all in one.  Like the monolith.  Like the phenomena of the backrooms, its actual pop culture ubiquity.

 

We choose art because it reflects something in us.  Art, like our friend the monolith, is the o.g. black mirror.  And there's no small amount of art that goes into figuring out why an image Speaks, and what it's saying.  In this instance, for me, it's all about capital, baby.  The backrooms is about what america is, and has been since before my grandparents were inclined to have kids.  It's a machine for living in, and getting lost in, which only knows how to propogate the images it steals, and it's increasingly shoddy, slapdash, and surreal.  And the way you get there is by stumbling through a door you either didn't realize was there, or, by falling through an opening that wasn't all that hidden or structurally sound to begin with.

Capitalism, and its discontents...

 

I've heard a lot of chatter about the Still Lifes in the backrooms being a metaphor for the AI bullshit that's drawn all the flies, and yeah, sure.  But AI is just capitalism, too.  The material reality of AI is that it's just a tool, and the tool's utility is down to our ability to imagine uses for it beyond, y'know, cannibalizing everyone & everything it has ever brushed against.  It's an outgrowth of capitalism, that's all.  It's not the Dominant Metaphor for how much America sucks, even if it is in the running for top five examples.

 

No, at the end of things, the backrooms are the monolith:  a dark slab of potential, containing anything we care to envision.  We like to pretend we can envision Infinity, Eternity, and the Silence of God in all their terrible, meaningful aspects, but the fact is that Void of Potential & its Projected Contents will stun and belittle us and leave us feeling very old and alone with unkind, inevitable death.

Because...  That is the end of 2001.  Starchild notwithstanding.

 

Because there's nothing for that weird, isolated foundling to stand on.

Lest I sound like there's no Happy Ending, well--  there was.  In the original book version of 2001.  (Has that been revised by Clarke & his estate?  I've only read the original novelization.)  The starchild returns to earth and takes out our nuclear missile defense network and all the satellites attached to it.

Kubrick cut that shit.  And Kane Parsons doesn't leave us in any less enigmatic of a place.  Those final images, my friends.  Instead of a sinless, reborn infant wombed by naked space, we're left with a fragmented (therapist's!) self-image, adrift in a non-place.  Tell me that isn't saying something very specific & true about the involuted maze america is beginning to recognize itself as.

Yeah, yeah, spoilers:  NOBODY GETS OUT.

Is The Backrooms a great movie?  No.  But my god, it's full of sta