monstos

There is a blathering Traveler Man with the left-side of his face unshaven. "She changed her mind after six weeks and that's when I tried to hang myself with a vacuum cleaner." "Uh-huh," Bartender says. "Next one changed her mind after six years. Women do that, see," says Traveler Man. "So you tried to hang yourself with a vacuum cleaner again?" Bartender says looking around.

Moshy takes a sip and looks across the bar and sees them in the mirror and looks away again. Then a few smokers in the bright sun just beyond the doorway. Then a big green some kinda head staring in at him off the street, teeth bared.

He stares back at Green Man. Jesus fucking Christ.

His scalp stings and he looks in the mirror despite himself and then at the big green fucker with the teeth and pulls his foot up on to the stool and laces the boot fast and leaves the five on the bar and gets the fuck out.

blood meridian

"You judge a book by its cover but it's more like breathing than judging" is what Carson was thinking.

"The cover is the book because almost the instant you stop reading, the book becomes an object again. So a book had better look good because, like a high school athlete, its time as a thing of action, fully alive in your consciousness, is fleeting compared to the vast stretches it will spend unnoticed and unable to express itself."

He called his friend Moshy who as usual was having none of it at first, eating chocolate chips and drinking whiskey. But then he said, "Take me, I'm just finishing Blood Meridian-- drinking whiskey and finishing Cormac McCarthy's bloodbath of a book."

"That's cowboys, right? The Peckinpah of American fiction?" says Carson.

"Blood Meridian is the mother of all the McCarthy westerns, a poem to the manliest of emotions: love-hate. McCarthy probably only vaguely understands how much he loves the terrible things in his books. The book is all how European-America in its westward expansion was the ineluctably genocidal result of fully extended western thought and tradition, where everything alive must be destroyed in order to be understood, where the power to dominate is the only power imaginable. This thing is over the top utterly, a satire almost of itself, of the author's ambitions for it and of McCarthy's personal obsessions..."

He could hear Moshy drinking and thinking, chewing the cookies. "Almost a satire," says Carson into the air.

"Yeah almost but not. I was a reluctant reader of this book but I think it's one of these singular works of art, one born of the confluence of the particular talent of McCarthy with the particular subject matter with the particular ambition and the practice and the readership and the point to make, all of that coming together-- the almost freak confluence setting it apart from most other creative things by just that much, whatever amount that is, regardless of whether or not you personally go for it, you know?

"And here's the thing, to get back to your point… I'm having this readerly experience, right, taken away over the centuries and into the desert and so on, and I can't get over the fact that the cover is bad. The book's a Vintage International and Vintage International is always great, the books always looking like a pleasure to read, always understated, dignified but accessible, even hip... But no, they fucked up Blood Meridian. There's a smallish photo of a lone tiny rider against a southwestern landscape in muted tones-- not quite pastels, but as I say, muted. The title remember is Blood Meridian. What's muted about that? That's about as descriptive colorwise as you can get. And those words appear in gold cursive. It's just all wrong, like the book is Jane Austen in New Mexico, terrible. Nothing about the cover is bold. It's corny where it should be imaginative, which is not the thing with this book at all. They had to think big, as big as the landscape and the crimes committed there, big like the error of Manifest Destiny and of the modern age by extension, big as the ambition and voice of the work, a twentieth-century Old Testament… At the same time, the book is American and about the west, so it must speak to all of these things as economically as possible. There must be nothing that hints at finery or frivolity in any way. No silly cursive..."

"So what did you have in mind?" says Carson.

"What you need is hideous beauty, and outsized. Carnage is what I'm talking about. But not bodies directly because it's a story about how a way of thinking was the root of the violence, how the thinking rippled across the ages down into one killing field after the next, each one a triumph in blood and guts over the last. So why not draw on someone who has done the same thing visually? That would be the thing, to get visual art that makes a bold statement about the murderous tragedy of modernism. Right?"

"Of course," says Carson. "You had me thinking of Okeefe, before the blood and guts, but no, then someone making sculpture out of junk in the desert, but then I thought that person was a Don Delillo character and not a real artist..."

"Carson it has got to be Ed Burtynsky, his box-camera wide-angle nickel tailings running like chemical rivers or his desolate Uranium dump fields, the poisoned beautiful legacy of the last three hundred years, our doomed future. This is the man. You put that on the cover and the words "Blood Meridian" in semi thick type and set the whole thing against the usual Vintage International black and the book suddenly is up for like Chip Kidd-quality rave reviews and awards. People who would never read the book would read it and love it. It'd be bigger than Dave Eggers, man, like Steven King numbers, Carson."

"Ed Burtynsky... Moshy are you-- who are you going to call to make this dream a reality?"

"No, no. This is not my book," says Moshy, suddenly deflated. "You're mocking me. What kind of a man mocks a drunk McCarthy-reading friend in a late-night, you know, revelry? What did I come here for?"

en haut

In a room upstairs the boy listened to the floor. "She talks like a baby, barely French at all." His nostrils were full of the smell of the rug, which was the smell of the house. "She’s like a doll."

Across the hallway on the floor under the window in the toilet room, two doves in a cage were calling into the narrow nighttime courtyard, warbling like deep-space sirens.

He would creep down before dinner to see the delicious things the Americans had to eat, how they would share with him without seeming to care, without monitoring his intake, delicacy plates of fries, sushi, pizza, cookies... He would fill his mouth and run and hide in the apartment and the parents seemed not to care, to encourage the running, even, chasing the children like children themselves, red faced, crawling after him and the beautiful doll-girl wherever they would hide together, slipping and falling, all of them together, careening into the large empty walls, moving furniture, slamming doors!

He rested his head on the worn rug. He heard his enormous father strike a match. The doll-girl stopped crying and it was silent except for the doves and the sound of Mo-Mo stacking the chairs on the sidewalk across the street. A scooter sputtered and then buzzed loudly in the distance. In the morning she would find him again "like a bundle" on the floor, hounding him all through the dressing and breakfast and down the stairs past the apartment door, where all would be quiet inside, until he broke free of her hand and rang the bell!

remix

He was a ghost in the room orchestrating the turntables, painting the walls with the sound.

Peace says Fred Rogers, crazy enough to make you laugh. I had to quit that church to save my soul, says George Carlin, to save my soul, save my soul. And it keeps spinning spinning spinning like that.

Fore you know it Amadeo in your head wakes up atop three tiny café tables, one leather shoe and one bare foot, in a cobblestone square no idea. There's a rip in the button sweater and one elbow throbbing in his sleeve. And it keeps, it keeps spinning like that, keeps spinning like that.

He opens his eyes but they're black. Then they're not. He closes them and opens them. Black again. He does it three more times, Amadeo, doo-doo-doo-da-doo.

Café chairs and tables stacked up all around him, feels the metro somewhere far below, smells eggs, or sulfur, people moving among the paintings, I had to quit, I had to quit to save my soul.

mia

"You like that nostalgia eighties trip?" "No I don't go for that. What I go for is the mixing in of the euro-youth-liberation spirit of the times then with the globalized spirit of today!"

moshy

He thought he wanted the boots, that the boots would make it alright. But the boots hadn't changed a thing. The awareness brought on a strangeness and he realized the feeling had nothing to do with the profile photo he felt compelled to post earlier that had plagued him and that started the rash of long-distance calls. There was behind the calls, though, after all the laughter fell away, the sense of feeling men in jeans in a mosh pit, of being one of the men in jeans, moshing and being moshed.

ed

Sweat-soaked Ed the insect, climbing the hill in the heat, half-consciously trying not to breathe the air and so feeling about to faint. Concentrating now on being methodical about setting up the camera. Heat and fumes. He knows what he’s got here. The blood rushes from his hat to his pants. He knows what he’s got. He knows who he is. He knows what we are. He begins snapping his version of the family portrait.

la fenetre

On the way home she was saying "What about those things? Don't we have to pick up that stuff? From those people's house? The stuff we were supposed to send to Paris? You know? Are you with me?" So of course yes. I get in the right lane, pull the thing over, three-point-turn and head back to the middle of the city. Suddenly the night opens up. We've been liberated by banality. The thing from the people has set us on a path to nighttime freedom and adventure!

diy day

The netpublics group at the annenberg center for communication at USC threw an interesting party this past weekend. Ok, I guess it was a conference. But in addition to academics, it hosted journalists and new-media “makers,” which was what made it worthwhile, the attendees all connecting (sort of) as a netpublic!

There was a lot of information and a lot of comedy, too-- both engendered mainly from excellent, really revealing, disconnects. I mean confusion you could see on people's faces. It was a good thing, a credit to the organizers. They managed to put on a conference that left people wondering... that's pretty rare.

The mostly young new-media makers seemed a little self-conscious. There was the best-offense-is-defense approach: “I thought you academics might be a tough crowd... so I’d like to talk today about failed talks I’ve given in the past.” There was the you-look-like-my-parents approach: “So you guys, you just, like, hook up a camera to your computer with a cable and there are totally these sites that will host your video for free. You can do it!” There was the utterly defeated: “If you haven’t watched this anime series-- well, you haven’t-- anyway, the remix plays with character and chronology—the long-haired girl is actually a boy-- um, the relationships might be sexual-- in any case, the editing is just amazing, playing with the thrash metal soundtrack-- yeah, it’s really unbelievable, for example, check it out, it’s raining in scenes where there was no rain! [silence] Well [audible sigh] okay, here it is...”

The academics at times seemed equally off balance in their responses. There were the overly focused: “This just seems, I dunno, flippant. Can any of this remix really stand in the place of political-minded deliberation?” There was the Old World: “I don’t dare say it, of course, but, truly, what would Marx think of this Make magazine?” There was the over compensating: “It’s just amazing video you’re making, really powerful corporate deconstructions. How have you so far managed to elude the big-brand henchmen?”

The effect was both optimistic and reserved. It was very 2.0 in that it was wary. There were whole stretches of the day that felt suspended, like David Letterman would be coming out between "acts" to ask: “Was that something?” But there was also definitely the excitement that comes of grasping at the future together. The future we were imagining, I think, was not so much in the material presented-- anime, machinima, remix-- but in the way people involved in those genres seem to be thinking. And it’s the mentality switch at the heart of participatory-convergence culture that speaks to all the questions about whether any of the actual work we were seeing matters, whether any of it can make a difference in the so-called real world. Any revolution worthy of the name is a revolution of the mind.

El Presidente: a satire of true facts

He moved in his dark German car west past the tomb of Napoleon as police waved traffic in both directions, up and down the banks of the Seine. As he sped over the streets that looped around the entrance of the grand military building, the ancient canons, the fortress walls, he gave his usual salute. A young man across the street on a bike in a camouflage jacket stared at him through the windshield of the car. Geraldo de la Grosso y Gasset looked away from the young man's face and at his own hands on the steering wheel. Who the hell was that? How did he know that kid?

Two minutes later he was parking under avenue Bosquet, still trying to place the face but also trying to shake it off, out of his head. He looked around as he came up out of the garage onto the sidewalk. No one he recognized. But everything else was there: low gray clouds like a ceiling as far as he could see, damp air off the river soaking into his lungs, the top thirty feet of the outdated oversized radio tower watching him from over the rooftops. He stared back at the mesh-metal giant and clenched his jaw. It watched him move into a side street. He walked backwards, as if through a pair of saloon doors. Then he laughed and looked straight ahead, stretched his arm out fast in front of him, his expensive suit sleeve jumping back to expose the heavy watch on his wrist.

It was Saturday morning and the Filipino man behind the desk smiled.

"No rest for the wicked, Eddy," said Geraldo de la Grosso y Gassett in accented English, waving a finger, his heavy shoes clapping on the tile floor as he moved through the lobby and past the desk.

"No sir," Eddy may have said, the man in the suit not exactly listening as he went round a row of open wooden office mailboxes into the elevator, smiling as he always was at that point in his morning commute-- tiny Eddy, the mailboxes and the elevator being the best features as far as he was concerned of the rented university building where he ostensibly carried out the obligations of his position each day. The flesh of his face tightened into a grin as the silly paneled elevator struggled up the mere four flights to his office. The thing never failed to cheer him, the comic creakiness of it, the panels and mirrors. He was sharing a private joke with his reflection, having a good laugh at each floor the thing managed to grumble beyond. Ha! This contraption, this fucked-up Jules Verne-style “rising box” was the perfect opening detail in the portrait of shabby gentility presented by the university that he loved precisely for the cover it provided him. It was his urban cosmopolitan version of tan-speckled fatigues for the world of desert battles likely to continue for the next coming hundred years.

****