Mode operandi

Time: We tell time by dividing it into styles. (More on this later by popular request.)

Keeping time: We’ve chosen to replicate ourselves for the time-being. Or do we stretch ourselves onto the apparatus in the penal colony, then await branding with the word on the street?

Vox Populi: Calvin Klein is but one couturier spelunking the archive of modern humanity. Good sports wear. Bad sports bare.

No style: To be strictly objective and devoid of the affectations of style in terms of word-choice, ideas, political or social trends.

12 Observances:

1. I will wear no more boring clothing.



2. I will be true to myself, moment by moment.



3. My words, thoughts, deeds and appearance will be in perfect alignment and never be the cause for gossip or embarrassment.



4. I will be new.



5. I will not be modern.



6. Anything can be said in the Lingo Franca.



7. Anyone can be anything in the Pax Kapital.



8. I will be one with the Street and will try my best to find the right street.



9. Some things you’ll always get used to.



10. Every time I’m used I will be paid.



11. Make way for intimacy.



12. Recognise that to be seen is to be judged: Judge others, lest I be invisible.

The Real Self

Intimacy is what most of us desire; it’s also industriously feared and avoided. Will Self’s story “Caring, Sharing” succinctly encapsulates these feelings. On the surface, it’s a science fiction scenario. The protagonists are modern-day Manhattan sophisticates that just happen to have lumbering monster-sized body-guards to take care of them. These creatures are also child-like, and cuddle adults as if they were un-weaned babes. The two main characters go on a date, and they even have a “sleep-over” afterward, but there is never physical contact. Nor do they share much outside their neuroses. They are both nerve fasci on par with Woody Allen’s persona. However, the huge child-monsters, innocently enjoy life, and sex (unbeknownst to their clue-less world-weary sponsors).
Like many other satisfying satires, the story is not ABOUT my interpretation… it suggests many alternate readings. So this little review isn’t a spoiler. Self doesn’t imply any interpretation. The monsters could also be psychological shadows of many qualities adults slough off or deny. For me the story asks questions that torment me. Why are we both sophisticated and oblivious? Why aren’t we honest about our desires and fears? Why don’t we admit we need constant approval and cuddling? (That is, at least for ourselves, if we don’t have a posse of admirers)

Will Self is usually a vicious visceral satirist with an over-stimulated vocabulary. I loved his supremely nasty Naked Apes, which tears apart contemporary society. And I was disturbed in a good way by My Idea of Fun, where the reader gets up-close and personal with a deluded psychopath. This story was a refreshing... unencumbered prose, and seemed compassionate even as it exposed human weaknesses. If any readers of this review have also come across compassionate satires, please let me know about them. They are quite rare, rare because one must laugh at the protagonist AND feel sorry for them. How often are we led to feel that? Deserved derision coupled with a sympathy for human nature.

This story made my day and I’d be surprised if it doesn’t nourish me for years to come.

Crises unfold in the laugh of luxury

The soul-less minions of orthodoxy have so far reacted to my purported nuclear test with indifference. But as West Van matrons, and other imperialist running dogs, who tear down alternative rock posters from telephone poles, move to slap stricter sanctions on my isolated self, some community standards experts say there's a risk regional tensions could disrupt my alternative laughstyle.

While the newly entitled mothers with their children ensconced in hummer-prams have no immediate cause for concern, my nuclear arsenal could add a new element of instability to the cosiness quotient of my neighbours who don’t do their recycling, said a creep who called me a faggot in Caffe Roma.

"Commercial Drive is really a dynamic community at this stage, but a spoiler could be military tensions with the Last Lapser," he said.
The likelihood of a military conflict is slim, he added. "But it's thinner now than it was two weeks ago."

After I claimed I successfully conducted a nuclear test last week, my neighbour moved to punish me by bad-mouthing me to their doctor at the walk in clinic where I get my antibiotics if my pimples turn into boils.

And my long-time ally who raises wild plants, condemned me over the reported nuclear test.

"Ultimately, everyone recognizes a military conflict with the Lost Lapser would be extremely costly and the outcome would be unpredictable," a pushy telemarketer said, adding that the community would possibly try again to engage me in diplomacy.
But, the Ayahuasca dealer noted, sanctions resulting in a blockade or quarantine could spark strong backlash from me.

"It's in the realm of the possible that inadvertently, a nuclear indecent would occur," Lina at Caffe Napoli said.

Desperately pooped and paranoid, I do not contribute to the region's robust community standards.

"It's almost as if Commercial Drive is the donut, and he is the whole," a volunteer at the Community Policing office said off the record.

Nonetheless, a parking meter attendant noted, jitters set off by me could eventually hinder the smoothly functioning sphinctres of my neighbours.

Trade between my community and me is negligible. Last year, two-way trade was a mere $21.7 million. And though the little lady who collects the beer bottles has diplomatic ties with me, there has been little exchange between us since 2003, when I withdrew from the neighbourhood block watch treaty for nuclear non-proliferation.
Vancouver-based community standards specialist Al Anon said there are many factors that could indirectly curtail status quo opportunities for yuppy-wanna-bes in the rest of East Vancouver.

The Team Vancouver administration, which regards me as among the "asses of evil," has advocated stiff finger wagging against me over the past week.
Anon noted that further nuclear tests could provide a pretext for Kitsilano to implement new "anti-terror" measures or travel restrictions to the region, which would hamper West End emotional investment.

Also, if South Granville. ramps up its military presence in Strathcona and drags Chinatown into a conflict with me, "that may directly affect us in a major fashion," the neighbour who clips my hedge when I’m not around, said.

I’ll forgo my own opinion in lieu of idle speculation.

today's recommendation

Ben Katchor has something to say about the decorative impulse. He is a cartoonist who has made visible the urban decay, frayed moral fibres, dissolute history and fragmented knowledge stuffing our morally useless heads. His book The Beauty Supply District has nothing pretty in it. But in the Manhattan where this story is located we walk by stores with names like DECORUM, NON-OBJECTIVE IMAGERY, and ANALEPSIS... oh, yes, and one of my favourites, UP-TO-DATE SYMBOLISM. To unwind we grab a bench in the Municipal Laxative Garden (with the funny pages shrouding our heads, of course), and for edification we take in the Katsigh Collection of Worn Shoes and Broken Laces.

Now, to be tedious, back to the decorative impulse. I figure that what Katchor is trying to say is that we all try to beautiful our lives with curlicues and gaudy paint. It's an impulse. An impulse made taudry by society's apologists who would have us be practical. But Katchor's no whiner like me. He says it all with a sigh... a sigh made of pictures and words. Not a sound. Katchor's world ends in whimper.

"I like male writers that write like females."

"Well, I prefer female writers that write like men, and secondly males that write like women."

"Don't either of you care about verisimilitude? It’s more natural to like women who write like women and men who write like men."

"Well, that sounds natural, but how often will it take you anywhere? I’m not going to go out of my way to look for exceptions."

"May I butt in? I prefer the books that have not yet been written."

"You’re my kind of reader -- I only want to write the books that have not been written."

Laughter, guffaws.

A typical conversation I remember from the coffee houses of my youth. I understand the beat movement is making a comeback. But I don’t think the mood could ever be recaptured. Oh, listening to Thelonious Monk plunking away on his bass, while Jack Kerouac impassionately read from his latest bidets-doux. Sometimes I saw Satie in a corner write bony music with his fastidious hands.

In those days it was common to rub heads and shoulders with the great and the famous. For example Allen Ginsberg who was great but not yet famous, or Andy Warhol who was famous but not yet great, or bump into the fetus of somebody fabulously famous today.

The money and grants that run the arts today had no part of the Beat movement. We were all poor and we were all passionate. Art was a gift, and all we required was camaraderie and comradeship. A friendly fuck or sharing some coke or a few joints was all one needed to walk home with a masterpiece under one’s arm. And there was no harm in it, because very often the artist was too enlightened to notice anything missing.

In those days art was dangerous, not like today when paper cuts are the worst thing you can get from a poem. I became a homosexual because I read Ginsberg’s "Howl." Ask my psychiatrist if you don’t believe me. He said you couldn’t read that poem straight all the way through. Other lesser known poems caused revolutions in hundreds of Central American countries. In those days the suffering the CIA caused in the places I can’t remember the names of now was inexcusable. We all demanded that this must stop -- my personal acts of solidarity were coffee and chain smoking -- both being common activities of peasants in the South. I didn’t expect the working classes to understand how much I was doing for them; the moral sympathy vibes were incalculable.

Nowadays with the advent of AIDS our free love is looked down on by everyone. But you have to understand that venereal disease was a rite of passage then. And strictly speaking nothing was every really "free," except lunch perhaps. There were always strings attached, like first names, brushing your teeth, bathing. We did have standards, which we ignored, but we did have standards we looked up to, and we found it easier looking up to things laying on our backs.

Burning the American flag has become a hip subject. We were way ahead in the desecration game: carrying around bits to wipe our noses on, eating it and shitting it, pissing on it, singeing it, baking it, and on occasion, burning it. Burning it was for people who didn’t have imagination. We looked down on people who burned the flag, I mean, what a cliche! We gave the flag a rough time because of Nam.

Now, Nam was like Korea except that America had a become a fascist dictatorship -- which was started by Senator McCarthy -- who paved the way for present day Hollywood by making it hard for screenwriters with ideas to keep their jobs. Apparently there was a communist-Jewish conspiracy to convert everyone to being card carrying Bolshevist atheist Kallabah scholars. Pete Seeger was one of them and I was all for it -- for me it was all about collectivist individualism. I would have killed to protest having to die for one’s country. And that more than anything shows how America couldn’t do without the Beats.

just ad vice & serve

Majorities, are always opressive, moral or otherwise. Only the most single-minded narcissist can resist trying to appear the same as everyone else. As a consumer I feel my choices both endorse the products as well as the packaging, and all the images and language and values which appear on the box.

So, a self-identified gay man, yours truly, such as myself, using the royal we, feels creeped out buying a pack of condoms. More creeped out than a straight man. Still more creeped out than a straight woman. We all know the basic yuck feeling - like parading underthings before strangers. All but one brand of condom had heterotic foreplay on their covers. But I wonder, "Will these condoms stand up to the rigours of butt fucking?" Couldn't the package have a little politically correct sticker after-thought: "Fits fags fabulously!"

The non-orientation specific brand is Lifestyles, a euphemism for sodomy, debauchery or some other revisionist post-Darwinian strategy. But it's also the most generic, non-descript, and CHEAPEST brand. Clearly, if I want to make a statement through purchasing, this was my only choice. But I also felt like I was buying myself short, going for the non-L'Oreal; somehow I wasn't worth it. Am I getting too worked up about nothing? Hard to know, for fags like me, self-esteem issues pop up with an unhealthy regularity while cruising the aisles at a drug store, or checking out the cashiers, or watching the cashiers look wryly at my brand loyalties.

But I can't, won't buy a "straight" condom! They have such oxymoronic names. Trojan sounds like an stealth vessel, once inside enemy camp opening to release gazillions of sperm warriers. Sheik is a placating name to the injured stud whose harem is more like a glue factory waiting room.

The only solution is a slew of new brands, celebrating the sexual freedom afforded by the condom, springing from their packages upon all the willing, the able and the enabled. Bestsellers would include The Hard's Ease, Without a Trace, Kiss with a Seal or the licentious No Holes Barred.

Finally, I don't have any advice for the unbranded. If you get lucky, just grab what you can. A real man will take the wrap.

fool's circle

I first watched Fahrenheit 451 (Francois Truffaut) on TV in my teens; I was dumbfounded by such a boring scifi movie without cool special effects. But the premise was great: what if we lived in a society that banned and shunned writing and literacy?

I rewatched the movie on dvd yesterday, after 20-odd years, and finally got it. Although the cover blurb had to point out to me that Julie Christie played the roles of the heroine & anti-heroine (methadon-ette?); just as I had to be told that one woman was played by 2 actors in The Obscure Object of Desire (Luis Bunuel).

Reader's Digested Version:
Setting: An edition of our own society where all books are banned.
Story: A fireman, who burns books and arrests readers, is enticed into literature by non-com educator. The fireman becomes estranged from his numb, conformist wife who is repelled by his book-loving ways. She reports him to the authorities. He escapes to live with the book people, who memorize books, "become books", to evade Big Brother.

Luscious to watch - smooth, elegant Hitchcockian cinematography by Nicholas Roeg - long seductive sequences of books burning - cool colours interrupted by the lipstick red firetrucks - the whole thing lusciously un-sexy. And Bernard Herrmann's music has the same dusky, romantic, semi-sweet quality I loved so much in Psycho. Angelo Badalamenti, David Lynch's fave scorer, owes Herrmann a drink (hopefully Heaven is not a nation of teatotallers).

Many people find the ending hopeful 'cause the book people preserve literature by memorizing it. But it's tragic; the authorities succeeded in annihilating the written word. This society has come full circle, and listen to stories as we once did, rather than read them.

TV is the medium for keeping everyone docile. Not much has changed since the '60s. Fahrenheit 451's society is paranoid; they believe that people who think differently will make everyone unhappy. In our society, people who have different beliefs are potential terrorists. All books are obscene in Fahrenheit 451's society; in our society people don't understand that any book and no book is pornography.

Now for my anti-climax:
Any real society, utopia or distopia begs the same question: At which point are we in the cycle of propaganda to reality back to propaganda? We can't tell and we're fools.