The Oscars: A Clammy Tribute

     Between December 26, 2k8 and February 23, 2k9, this blog will refinish the tacky gold plating on old naked Uncle Oscar and render it shiny and fresh enuff to look spiffy on even Ramon Novarro's mantelpiece.  Ladies and gentlemen, trannies and hermies, may we present to all sentient beings:

  

     THE CLAMMIES!!!

     THE CLAMMIES!!!

     Give it up for THE CLAMMIES!!!

     

     

     (Tepid, tentative applause pitter-pats here and there in the nearly empty ampitheatre.  The bandleader barely stifles a gaping yawn.)

     Every post between to-morrow and the Monday after the Nite of the Red Carpet Mile will be devoted to subverting and renovating the Oscars and adding bay windows, brickface and other niceties to the very conceptual structure of the award ceremony.  Every post will reference the Oscars and/or the Clammies at some point or another.  Awards and their ceremonies may pop up when you least expect them, or they may be the very trilling locus of my tales, trend analyses and tirades.

     George C. (The Great Actor) Scott thought it wuz degrading and humiliating for thespians to compete against each other, so he very publicly no-show-Jonesed his Best Actor Oscar for portraying George S. Patton.  Patton, who was not only a Marlene Dietrich-fucker (or so she bragged) but the Vince Lombardi of tank brigadiers, found it degrading and humiliating to compete with Field Marshal Montgomery and General Zhukov for the prize of Adolf Hitler's mustache presented with upper lip still attached, so there was a certain historical parallel attached to Scott's afterparty-pooping.  GCS, a notoriously prickly sorta boozer when he wasn't imitating dive bombers with flailing arms and attempting pratfalls in the War Room, failed to see the jocular absurdity of the process or consider the possibility of turning what he called the "God-damn meat parade" into a postmodern performance piece w/ (or w/o) heavy sociocultural overtones.  Marlon Brando and Sacheen Littlefeather would accomplish that a coupla years later; after Brando had re-invented acting for the second and third time in the space of one year, he scored a triad by recombobulating the art of accepting trophies.

     My question, as usual, is:  wtf is wrong with meat parades?  Darnitall to heck itself, wtf is objectionable about degradation and humiliation, as long as it's consensual, GCS?  Gitcher big ol' beak out of the martini shaker, wipe Colleen Dewhurst's drunkdrool off 'n the bib o'yr turtleneck sweater (ew, snotty, save that for the maid) and embrace the unthinkable...

     Which is, that performance art, so transcendentally silly and sensually serious, is inherently larger than life.  It's garish, non-utilitarian and so far over the top it lands upside down, where it plants and grows roots out the mouth, nose and ears.  Cattle calls can be liberating.  Flesh traders don't own you if you won't let them (Mary Ann hadda learn that the hard way in "Prime Cut").  The life of an actor, cracked or otherwise, is a luxury liner's voyage in sewage, and that's a major oodle of why it's true and beautiful and beneficial.  No artist in any medium is more distinctly, naturalistically human than a thespian who spends far too much time gazing like Narcissus at the vaguely grey bubbles in backyard septic tanks, Brigadier.  

     I won an award, once.  O Man O God O Man O God I wish I had a roomful.  The physical nature of my solitary award mocked my very love of the concept.  Two English teachers picked me as McCluer High School's Poetry Award Winner.  I received a miniscule pin that said "MERIT" on it, you could read that if you squinted.  The pin was tinier than a flaccid clit.  Poetry don't sell beans and it never shapes mountain ranges anymore, but couldn't they have given me something half the size of a broken bowling trophy?

     I can only dream of trodding red carpets in my middle age.  Meanwhilst, I'll disseminate Clammies with more fervor and approbation, esp, if they honor the worst among us.  Judas is necessary and beyond sacrilege.

Welcome to the New, Re-branded, Re-formatted Clambroth!!!

Er, uh, what it says in the header...

To-morrow, the notorious festival of grief and shame known in furtive whispers as "Christmas Day" will mark something good and holy for a change.  The proprietor of this bloggishment, jotto the merciful, will make a startling announcement that will immediately transform popular culture in heretofore unseen ways.  Be mindful of your manners, pray to be predator, and don't forget to leave bear traps on the rooftops this eve before it's too late.

A Weather Crisis Has Indeed Occurred

  I won't be able to update this blog until Christmas Eve.  Curse these confounded holidays.  Boycott them, I say.

12.22.k8

  The nouveau "Clambroth" will debut on this date, barring weather crises.  I look forward to returning from holiday necessities beyond the drawbridges of Clamville with minimal difficulty.  

A Final Daily Week: Damn, King Barry's Good

     The grandmasters of chess are said to see the match four, five, six moves ahead.  Paul Morphy, it is told, could see eight moves ahead, but his was a time of slower and more precise, less crowded neurolinguistics.  We no longer create things and fashion victories in rooms of quietude.  The zeitgeist pounds at our walls to make noise for us, and we must interact.  Creative solutions, like life itself in its crawling stutter steps of halting progress, becomes purely reactive and glistens with shards of cultural pollution.

     Bobby Fischer looked for places with sound muffled by ice and permafrost and tyranny.  He didn't seem to realize that in this day of age the voices always break thru.  Disruptions are as inviolate as the seasons in gravity.  They remain intact and plasticized, molded but never broken or avoided.  The postmodern genius deals.  Paradigms must be co-opted; smashing them into slivers of glass or seeping them aside will make them burrow into the skin of our feet and the soft wet pockets of our lungs.

     In the course of lulling us to sleep with His beige, Metamucil 'n' Marrow-thick choices for His Cabinet, Good King Barry rattled our cribcage with a bold yet cringeworthy selection for Secretary of State.  Lady Hillary, the bane of Good King Barry's ascension, was bestowed with keys to the fiefdom of Dear Foggy Bottom.  As if a scab had been ripped from a healing mortal wound, the gnats donned vulture's garb, darting to release eggs of emotional pestilence.  What hath Good King Barry wrought?  Are we to be liege or leaf, and is there at all a difference in the broad scheme of Nature's Grande ol' Dame?  We do after all enter upon the Hybrid Era, wherein suffocation itself can be source...

     The Good Sovereign's deliciously deviant scheme emerges immediately after Lady Hillary becomes enmeshed in His paramount web.  She has forgotten that He can move both forwards and backwards.  He does, in fact, reverse the siege to his very gestation to smother his rival most effectively and incontestably.  There is no stronger power than that of a nascent presence, a gifted and beloved child cloaked in education, protection and predestination.  This power on earth was the most famous child in the world when Good King Barry was conceived.  

     Lady Caroline arrives in court with her procession.  They need no favored seat at the conference altar.  They brought their own booth behind veiled thresholds and own a legacy of arable soil and estate more vast than either GKB's or LH's. 

     Good Queen Caroline will reign in the year of our Mother 2k16.

     The House of Kennedy will be restored, and the solipsistic, turbulent House of Clinton be kept at a respectful distance.   

     Good King Barry leans back in his throne, eyeing the board askance with one keen eye, balancing as precariously as Henry Fonda on "My Darling Clementine"'s oblique Tombstone porch, awaiting the human contents of his domain's daily incoming carriage.  He keeps his Ladies closer than Wyatt Earp did.  That matters.

     

     

Gathering Sticks and Mud

     A storm blew the nest apart, but that's never a tragedy, it's nature.  I'm gathering sticks and mud to build a new nest here.  Next week I'll post it.  There will be new categories and I'll dispense with any daily anything.  Open wide for daddy bird's regurgitation.

      What could possibly be a more nauseating marketing pitch than that?  Never fear, Polly Purebred, I'll brainrain something more vile...

The End of Days

     My blog will henceforth be dubbed "Clambroth".  I'll maintain the topics listed by days of the week, but I won't be maintaining the pretense of posting each and every day.  More details will ensue shortly.

The Daily Copout

     I've been advised by a wiser soul than I that I'm stressing out a wee much about hitting self-imposed marks in perfect camera range here.  My daily deadlines are killing my spirit as quickly as I've begun.  Therefore, the two or three of you out there who read this on a daily basis will now be advised that the "daily" part of these blog titles is largely hypothetical.  I must leave, I cannot bring my blog with me wherever I go.  I do promise w/o interlocking toes & fingers that I'll be a regular contributor to my own blog and will make it a daily ritual as much as time and life allow.  I need a secretary...Velma, take a break from your ballet lessons, we need to alienate another sucker's affections.   

The Daily Yarn/"CHICAGO SHANGHAI!!!": Chapter 1...The Kiosk

     The following can be a collective tale stemming from a singular pre-credit sequence.  Or not.  Spin your own abduction fantasy from two characters and their setting.  I'll weave my own.  There is little or no fetishistic or sexual content early on, plenty later.  If you're good.  Insert your own cheesy drive-in D/s visions as the storyline pro/regresses.

------------------------------------------------

     6:30 a.m.  Lightly hopping, two gulls dampen their webs in the waves of the great lake.  Patty silently coos over their cuteness. The morning is perfectly serene.  A dog scampers behind her with elderly owner in tow.  Their small stretch of the beach is otherwise deserted.  She shuts her eyes against the sunrise, opens them to focus upon a fixed point in the bruise-colored horizon, and commences her yoga poses.  Patty flexes without strain, ever mindful of breath.

     7 a.m.  Finished with her workout, Patty feels the synovial fluid bathing her cartilage.  She walks nimbly across the sand the morning after an evening of hobbling in sexy but excruciating slingbacks at that lameass office party.  She'd be more content wearing the lower-heeled black pumps to...what's this?  Here she is thinking about shoes and she nearly stumbles over a pair in the sand.  Fuchsia flats, hot magenta, tossed aside by a forgetful, unknowable owner and seemingly forlorn-looking so far from shore.  Patty compulsively lines them up in a parallel manner.  She considers taking them home with her but decides to leave them there.  

     8 a.m.  Patty stretches out naked on the sheets of the unmade bed in her studio rental apt.  She idly fills both hands with little tufts of auburn pubic hair and tugs lightly, a habit she's indulged since puberty.  This occasionally leads to masturbation but serves only to keep her awake this morning.  She really wants to sleep in...motherfucker, cocksucker, titty shitty on the grill!!!  She learned this nonsense litany of profane oaths on the playground when she was little and it still pops into her mind when she wants to swear.  Her brother Billy's reserved brunch for her at the swankazoid Signature Room of the John Hancock Bldg., tho, and she needs a better excuse to bail on that than lethargy.  Billy seemed so eager for her to meet his new girlfriend when he invited her--and he really can't afford to eat at a place like that, he must really like her.  At least she doesn't have to drag a date there.

     9:30 a.m.  Patty absently smoothes out the glittered black lace cocktail dress that she practically threw on in a sleepy daze after lollygagging in bed semi-listening to NPR's "Weekend Edition" until the last minute.  Maybe I should start drinking coffee, she thinks, and heads out the door.

     She glances at the small swimming pool next to her bldg. before crossing the sun-streaked sidewalk to the downtown express bus kiosk.  The sight always brings within her a small exhibitionistic thrill.  She must have been crazy to fuck anyone in there, much less a prick like Ray, with all those hundreds of high-rise windows above.  It really did seem easy to conceal and easy to do in the water; flotation made up for the minimized lubrication.  I gotta watch myself when I act out like that, she thinks, it could lead to other things that could affect my--

     O goody goody gumdrops, there's a guy sitting at the other end of the short bench.  Well, he looks harmless, a geek hunched over a newspaper...I'm just not in the mood for any creepy bullshit this morning...

The Daily Week: Info's Kinda Crazy w/ a Spooky Lil' Guv like Ours

     (posted Friday, not Thursday...)

     It's tough to be a history buff when you know a significant percentage of our collective storylines is a cruel masquerade.  In fact, reading or watching any mainstream news media source is like rooting for clean pinfalls in pro wrestling.  It's all dirty, it has to be, that's intrinsic in politics the white way as it must be in sex the white way.  The President-elect is brilliant partially because he knows how to play white more effectively than Godfrey Cambridge in "Watermelon Man", who gave away the game soon after the opening credits by racing buses and beating them.

     Being white is not racial.  It's all about closing doors and telling visitors you have no secrets.  White people of all ethnicities despise the truth, embracing visions that bear no burden of color.  We need to close our eyes against solid white, the lack of color hurts too much.  Therein lies the ineffable power of snow blindness.  Disinformation is lethal and like many other toxins we persistently consume it.

     I don't spend every day thinking about how phony many of our news items and historical phallacies are, but extreme skepticism does come to mind most days.  Oddly enough, our authorized beards, our disseminators of dissembling, don't even have to push details too far down our gullets to make us forget we have a gag reflex.  We're told that the Mumbai attacks may not have been perpetrated by al-Qaeda, but they're like al-Qaeda, so what's the diff?  We're told that the attackers are Pakistani without anyone being escorted into custody yet.  As with 9.11 and most of the other bad guy terror attacks dating back to the Haymarket Square hoax, the disseminators know what the bad guys are into and where they come from about five seconds after the attacks occur, but the bad guys don't claim credit for the attacks the way actual terrorists do.  

     What matters is that we--the good ones, the whites of all shades--must have a common enemy, preferably shadow-clad, very dumb enuff to both frighten us that they're capable of anything and reassure us that they're bound to lose.  White folks don't do nuance, and that includes the real Indians.  The terrorists our protectors fashion must not make sense; they must obliterate civilians irrationally, counterproductively, in order to make any motive indefensible and mobilize counterinsurgent opposition in the hearts and gonads of the masses, never mind the minds.

     The straw men must be flammable and they must elude permanent elimination.  Institutional power cannot survive without the nourishment of fear.  Ideologies like laissez-faire economics and neocon imperialism can wither and crumble in the changing zeitgeist, but NATSEC is the ever-standing idol we must worship--and our whitest gods decay whenever the feast of demonic blood runs dry.    

      

The Daily Verse: Haiku #2

teeter'd on the Pere

the flimsy waterfall cuts

liquid, less exposed 

The Daily Spot/The Art of Parallel Mythmaking: I Feel Joy Whenever I'm Well

     The morning of November 20 I sauntered into downtown Chicago's Harold Washington Library Center, which is one of a thimbleful of great architectural marklands erected on this planet after the Second World War.  Finding a virtual card catalog, and I'll always maintain that anachronistic moniker when i search for lie-bury goodies, I smirkingly typed a very controversial four-letter word into the search choo choo, resisting the devilish temptation to hit the caps lock:  "PORN".  

     I wasn't looking for dastardly videos of gooey genitalia gushing and blushing or pictures of people drying their wet body parts on wooden clothespins or...any images at all.  As rockist Peter Townshend once tearfully attested, I wuz merely doing research.  I analyze blowbangs, among other niches of digivideo perversity, and the world needs to know how I do it, w/ or w/o a saw-fret comb I may choose to secret in cerebral parts unknown.  Since I harbor ambitions to be the very first university professor to offer a class in "The Semiotics of Gonzo Porn", treating gp as a rarefied refinement of sexual performance art and moving beyond the usual borderliner dialectics that burden porn studies with pop-ed sociology, a review of what little we have between hard covers about the topic was in order.

     After two pages of mostly obsolete (i.e., pre-millennial) titles, I experienced a new sort of thrill ride when i saw the first entry on page three.  I knew that Michael "Mike Edison" Simberg, the drummer in Killdozer 85/Sharky's Machine, a rock band I worked with in the 1980's, had published a book.  I didn't realize that I'd encounter a listing for two copies of his bibliopus in the hallowed halls of the HWLC.  Hunting them down on the mustless bookshelves, I groped it free and skimmed the first chapter.  There I wuz in the very first chapter.  So wuz country music historian and satellite radio personality Jeremy Tepper.  Edison related a lengthy and intentionally semi-fallacious anecdote about an evening almost exactly a quarter century previous.  I'm jaded about many things but the feelings I had holding that book and squinting at its contents were fresh and complex.  I felt like Lee Marvin witnessing Gene Hackman devouring a big plate of livestock entrails in the Dommywood classic "Prime Cut".  You eat guts, Michael...well I knew it all along, I just didn't expect you to do it right in front of me, Mary Ann...   

     Two weeks later, I'm still unsure of how to react.  Do I counter the Edison character's kayfabe storytelling with mythmaking of my own?  Like his alleged nemesis Hulk Hogan, who seems to be increasingly hazy about knowing the difference between his in-ring persona and the artist born certified as Terry Bollea, Michael Simberg may no longer be able to grasp a verifiable fact without prejudice.  I've been wondering that about him for decades, and I say this with no rancor whatsoever and no sardonic humor, just sadness and empathy for what I believe is a severe and verifiable psychiatric disorder.  

     His powers of observation give him the ability to find verisimilitude, corroborative detail intended to bolster an aesthetic argument.  Verisimilitude is not objective, and I realize that Simberg provides a disclaimer in a title page that doth protest too much that his book is like pro wrestling and stuff, so don't take it as gospel truth.  Hogan does that sort of thing too..."Dude, you know it's all a work, brother!"...after he destroys competing wrestlers' careers thru in-ring bigfooting and backstage backstabbing, slanders John Graziano and Nancy Benoit in the mass media when they're too crippled or dead to fight back, etc.... Strangely enough (no, it really figures in the inherently psychotic milieu of Old School Pro Wrestling), Roddy Piper, the pre-eminent WWF heel of the 1980's whose work we and millions of others adored, issued a dreadful 2k2 "autobiography" of his own which also sacrificed both art and reality in the name of kayfabe grappling with verisimilitude.  Piper has eVinced Wonderful courage and honesty about the industry in recent years, and publishing "In the Pit with Piper" outside the WWE imprimatur gave him the option of telling it like it is, bullshit-free.  He blew it, and while Michael's book is deftly stylistic and funny in its early going and gets very touching and genuine for about Five Pages at the beginning of Chapter Three, he duz Two.

     I wuz revved up on FloDom fire when I first read "I Have Fun wherever I Go".  It made me conceptualize the possibility of a parallel mythmaking piece.  I could fairly easily write a page-for-page answer book in the vein of old pop answer songs like "Annie Had a Baby" and "He'll Have to Stay" w/ an identical word count.  I have plenty to say about everything he writes about whether I have personal knowledge about it or not, and that would be a groundbreaking exercise in literary obsession.  Has it been done before?  Quick, somebody who knows Frank Bank, write a word count-for-word count answer book to "Call Me Lumpy", which is poop culture's ultimate autobiography and available at a dollar discount at used biblio vendors throughout the Anglo-speaking world...

     I decided that I'd rather keytap about the great Dana DeArmond, a performance artist more fervid, talented and essential than any electric blues guitarist in history, getting her armpits fucked in a blowbang.  I'd rather keytap about Annette Schwarz treating a 20-thug blowbang as a novelty B-side to her intensely gorgeous anthems of degradation craft.  I'd rather keytap about Jake Malone, the Max Ophuls of powerporn, transforming yesterday's coke hag and to-morrow's boxcover starlet into D/s goddesses worthy of the von Sternberg Dietrich, w/ or w/o blowbangs.  The art of parallel mythmaking is a pretty lexischeme in my keytapping fingers, but I'd rather stick to the truest mission of "The Daily Spot", which is to elevate orphan subcultures, not invent them.  Besides, gonzo porn is the most innaresting and emotionally embroiling art form of the last five years in Uncle Sam's foreclosed America, driven by the tainted blood of its founder to collectively mindful purity... 

     The third saddest thing about the Mike Edison book--the saddest being his disinclination to connect the blindingly pulsating dots between his relationship with his family and every major decision he's made in his life (which makes him like me and almost everyone else, but if he admitted that he'd be Michael Simberg again, not "MIke Edison", and he can't allow that)--the second saddest being the relentless re-re-re-branding of the Old School Mike Edison gimmick that seems as fresh and relevant as the daring denim jacket and fedora look he dons for the most important photograph of his life, the dust jacket shot (Bert Sugar Jr. goes to a Dead show)--is how callous he continues to be as he makes up shit about our band KIlldozer 85/Sharky's Machine, a seriously flawed but unique and generally good-to excellent young group.  Some of what he writes is very true, some partially true but exaggerated, some utter mooheap.  That's not the issue.

     Let me take a deep breath here.  Mmmm.  Unlax.  OK.  

     THE ISSUE IS THAT HE NEVER FUCKING CONSULTED ANYONE IN THE BAND ABOUT ANYTHING HE WRITES ABOUT US!!!

     HE GETS YEARS WRONG IN OUR CHRONOLOGY!!!  WE WERE TOGETHER FROM 1984 TO 1989!!!  WE WENT TO EUROPE IN 1988 AND 1989!!!  HE CALLED KRAMER A CHILDFUCKER, NOT A RATFUCKER!!!  HE DOESN'T EVEN MENTION KILLDOZER 85, OR OUR ENTIRE 1ST LP--WHICH FEATURES HIS OWN BEST COMPOSITIONS!!!  WE PLAYED NEARLY HALF THE SONGS ON THAT LP LIVE FOR FIVE YEARS!!!  I WAS IN A BAD MOOD ALL THE TIME TOWARDS THE END BECAUSE I HATED WORKING WITH HIM SPECIFICALLY!!!  ALEC AND TONI DID TOO!!!  WE WOULD HAVE FIRED HIM AND REPLACED HIM IF WE'D STAYED TOGETHER AFTER THE SECOND TOUR--I HAD AT LEAST THREE CANDIDATES IN MIND TO REPLACE HIM!!!  ALL HE WANTED TO DO IN REHEARSAL WAS SMOKE WEED!!!  HE HAD A MANCRUSH ON THE ROLLING STONES--HE WANTED ME TO BE MICK JAGGER AND WEAR EYELINER AND BLOW HIM WITH MICKLIKE HARMONICA-SUCKING MAMBO LIPS (well, the last part's metaphorical, not literally true, but fuck the mancrush on those pathetic junkies already)!!!  HE WASN'T THE BANDLEADER, WE SHARED THE POWER!!! IT WASN'T HIS BAND TO BREAK UP!!!  I NAMED THE BAND "SHARKY'S MACHINE" AFTER THE KILLDOZER NAME DEBACLE DRAGGED OUT INTERMINABLY--THANX, WILLIAM DIEHL--AND HE HAS THE SHIT-STAINED BALLS TO CALL HIMSELF "SHARKY" FOR 20 YEARS WHILE BADMOUTHING US EVERY CHANCE HE GETS???!!!???!!!??? HE NEVER HAS A GOOD WORD TO SAY ABOUT ALEC, WHO'S A MORE TALENTED MUSICIAN AND SONGWRITER THAN HE'S BEEN FOR OVER 20 YEARS???!!!???!!!???  WHEN WILL HE ADMIT THAT HE CAN ONLY PLAY IN BANDS WITH COKEHEADS WHO PLAY SIMPLE CHORD PROGRESSIONS BECAUSE HE USED TO BE AN EXCELLENT HARDCORE PUNK DRUMMER WHO BECAME TOO DRUG-ADDLED AND BORDERLINE TO PLAY CHALLENGING MUSIC AROUND 1987???!!!???!!!???  YOU WISH YOU HAD MADONNA'S TALENT AND CHARISMA, SKEEZIX!!!  MAUREEN DOWD KICKS YOUR ASS INTO THE MIDDLE OF NEXT WEEK, AS A POP-ED WRITER, SONGSTRESS, ROVING COCKSMITH AND 5TH AVENUE FASHION PLATE!!!  YOU'RE THRU, NANCY, YOUR ARTISTIC VISION IS COMATOSE AND YOU KNOW IT--THAT'S WHY YOU WROTE YOUR OWN FUCKIN EPITAPH ON TREE SHAVINGS AND HAD THE COVER ILLUSTRATED WITH CARTOONS OF DEAD PEOPLE!!!

     I'd luv to correspond w/ Michael Simberg, the charming young adult I met at Rubin Hall.  As for "Mike Edison"...

     "DIE, MONSTER, DIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

     

The Daily Rushes: Trailer #1/The Meganoirs

     What exactly is a film noir?  Potter Stewart knew obscenity when he saw it and movie geeks know noir whether it bites them in the ass or not.  Objective standards are as ephemeral as interpretations of the Book of Revelations.  Film noir is in the eye of the beholder...or is it?  Can the most quintessential examples of the genre (or style, as many scholars have it) establish benchmarks for a roughly hewn definition?

     I'm formulating my own inky-shadowed recipe and choosing a racketeer's dozen well nigh indisputable fliques o'noir to fill an imaginary syllabus for a class entitled...

     THE MEGANOIRS (!!!) 

     They are, in chronorder (w/ a touch of alphabetizing):

     1) Double Indemnity (1944)

     2) Fallen Angel (1945)

     3) Scarlet Street (1945)

     4) Nightmare Alley (1947)

     5) Act of Violence (1948)

     6) Force of Evil (1948)

     7) Pitfall (1948)

     8) Criss Cross (1949)

     9) The Set-up (1949)

     10) Side Street (1950)

     11) Where Danger Lives (1950)

     12) The Big Combo (1955)

     13) Kiss Me Deadly (1955)

     I'll detail qualifying criteria for these "meganoirs" in the next installment of "The Daily Rushes".  Some criteria on the list will be standard op, like "chiaroscuro lighting"; others will be more contentious, like "subversion of contemporaneous mores".  Each classic flicker will be intrusively examined as they lean whorishly against a midnite streetlamp of their very own in weeks to come.

     

The Daily Meme: Squain

     The weaponry of words is merely one element in the sociocultural arsenal targeting single adults.  Husbands of wives get married; they have name-specific roles in a name-specific institution.  When has there been invented a satisfactory synonym for a physically intimate holistic relationship outside of marriage or betrothal?  Does the need for a simple, unitary term in itself help to provoke otherwise rational partners into making anachronistic, theocratically inspired legal vows?  Allow me to rescue one meme from semi-obscurity and invent another to help clarify relationship statuses-izz-izz.

     "Main squeeze" is archaic slang dating from 1896, according to anonymous and sketchy online sources.  Whatever the origin, it sounds poetic and feels palpable on the tongue 'n' palate.  "Squain" provides a unisyllabic synonym that can be orally stretched with a faraway look to match audio longing.  

     "Boy/girlfriend" is for children by definition.  "Man/womanfriend" is far too vague.  "Relationship", ditto in spades.  "The ol' ball 'n' chain" is funny but dysfunctional.  "Boo" wuz cute but went out w/ bling.  "Honey", "bunny" and other sunny familiarities make lonely singles and/or case-calloused cynics cringe.  "Special friend"?  We hear the startling honk of a short bus horn.  "Beau" and "swain" are lovely but specifically masculine.  

     You are my squain, dear.  Crush me with your hug.  In the immortal words of Neil Young in a tribute to his wife, "no one else can feel our pain", squain.

     Scorpios are such downers.

     

       

     

Bloggus Interruptus

     I've been hearing bustles in my hedgerow since November 20 of this year.  I'm not alarmed now or then, I knew all along it was just a sprinkling for the May queen.  

     I considered backtracking and filling the last two weeks with retrofitted bloggy goo, but I'll just resume this eve as if time was a bubble that burst and vaporized.  

still working...

on a major news update.  my blog may not be fully updated until early next week.  i'll keep my legion o'followers informed.

The Daily Rushes: The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums

     "The Daily Rushes" are a day late, bordering on two, and the producers are tearing their toupees out.  Hey, don't blame us, we don't make the weather--but we need to feed them a little to keep our project from starving, so here's a little about a peerless moviemaker who deserves a lot more analysis.

     I'll resist the temptation to paste a link to my friend and ex-roomie Bruce Bennett's NY Sun appreciation of Kenji Mizoguchi and leave it at that.  He certainly knows a lot more about the subject than I do; to-nite's viewing was only the third Mizoguchi I've witnessed, the others being "Ugetsu" and "Sansho the Bailiff".  I'l be content with borrowing his phrase, "gentle, unwavering camera".

     Like Mizoguchi's work itself, the lilt of said phrase is loverly, quotidian and universal, yet very specific in time and place.  A gentle, unwavering camera is what any basic shutterbug needs.  Life will often provide an amateur with accidentally brilliant framing and tantalizing whispers of what may be going on beyond the borders of the frame.  A Polaroid salvaged from a dumpster can be as beautiful and telling as a Robert Frank.  I gawked at old photos online to-day and marveled once again at the fitful genius of chance.  Some were great photos taken by profesionals or semipros; others were shot by Jane P. Friend or John Q. Acquaintance.  Experience and aesthetic purpose-mongering barely mattered, as long as the artists' hands were gentle and unwavering when they touched and clicked.  Time is a supremely indulgent art that regales us with fascinating stories in the recordkeeping of instants we see in photographs.      

     Kenji Mizoguchi was the most exacting of possible control freaks in the fine art of cinema.  Accounts of his precision and preparation make Stanley Kubrick seem like a crayon-wielding toddler scribbling wildly on a placemat.  Yet, the personalized, emotional reaction we have in watching and listening to his naturalistic work is nearly troubling.  We must eavesdrop in his world without losing ourselves in the comforts of cinematic voyeurism.  As technically meticulous as Mizoguchi's mise-en-scene is, it feels like hastily snapped photographs and recordings of strangers at their most emotionally vulnerable.  Even in the devastating "Ikiru" and "Rashomon", arthouse icon Akira Kurosawa let us finish the popcorn and soda we purchased to soothe any growls of nausea stemming from our commiseration (exacerbating the diabetic rush of the pop with a nauseating sickly sweet ending to the latter flick).  Interrupting a Mizoguchi scene with a chomping session or a bathroom break feels as inconsiderate as doing so in the middle of an intimate's teary-eyed confession.  We kneel before his imagery and perk ears for his fragile soundtracks of existence as if we're the repositories of his faith and vision.  Melancholy contemplation sates our appetites.

     J-Ro (Jonathan Rosenbaum--thanx again for the idea, B-Ben) described "Chrysanthemums" as "a movie about people trapped in boxes" during his lecture.  Mizoguchi liberates them and us with an incredibly lush exogenous world created to actualize both promise and threat.  As in "Sansho" and "Ugetsu", the most immediate threats tend to be just out of camera range, often literally around the stark, boxy right angles of a corner.  However, so is liberation of a more permanent nature, deliverance that lasts beyond social pressures or the ill passions of the moment and is often expressed thru serenely nurturing sounds.  Like no other director whose work I've encountered, Mizoguchi owns not only the space he so meticulously arranges in lines and waves onscreen but the space of our own being in time before the screen's beckoning call. 

     "The Daily Spot" will be a day late as well, and a money shot or more short.  We'll catch up with production after a quick haiku and get this baby back on sked by Friday.      

No No, Not Yet

     My posts for this week are running a day late at this point.  Life will sometimes intrude w/ my Daily Deadline.  We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause riders of the CTA.

     

The Daily Meme: Mapo

     Nigga, queer and perv are examples of reclaimed slurs:  words considered to be traditionally offensive that have been adopted as empowering sobriquets.  I get very offended by the idea of getting offended by language.  The morality of poetry is absurdly subjective, and besides, the sticks and stones are what are truly disabling.

     "Mapo" has never been a common insult for Uncle Sam's generally more sensible neighbor to the North.  I offer this vulgarization of Canada's national arboreal emblem as a symbol of pride before it ever gets adopted as an insult.  

     Canada is more likely to emerge as a budding world superpower in this millennium than other usual suspects.  China, Russia and India are all potemkin villages in their own ways, intra-cultural powder kegs barely tamped and stilled by the eventually toxic faux-asbestos of their national and local authority structures.  Quebecois to the contrary, Canada's national identity is, overall, genuine and logical and its philosophical and economic self-sufficiency are at least as apocalypse-friendly as any more blustery hegemon's.  They have land, fuel and expanding waterways which will only benefit them in case of severe global warming.  Most importantly, they tend to enjoy making sense.  Magical thinking is not a national pandemic there.

     Mapo Power could be our most effective progressive model in the third millennium after Golgotha.  Wear it on a T-shirt before a future President Tancredo or a Homeland Security chief Joe the Plumber shuts down the Ambassador Bridge in a fit of nativist hubris.

 

The Daily Dom: BDSM Triads--Philosophy, Religion, Sex

     I've mentioned this before, but if you read this as an elder or peer in the leather community and the hats look old, bear with me.  I write thedailyclam for a general adult audience.

     I'll cover the most elemental triad of BDSM--D/s, B & D, S/M--and where I fit within or without those categories next week.  From there I'll bounce gleefully between listed topics.  It is imperative that I discuss the most critical triad before I explore anything else in detail.

     My philosophical roots as applied to BDSM are very much intertwined with scholarship by three felow krauts, all born in the 19th Century:  Alfred Adler, Friedrich Nietschze and Wilhelm Reich.  I don't have time to specify these roots in great detail here to-nite; blogging is a format that prizes relative brevity and this trinity of giants in the history of human consciousness deserve more than a laudatory blurb or three.  I will add that they all teach us how to recognize and learn to differentiate the uses and abuses of power, which is paramount wisdom for a dom.  Reich, in particular, warned us how dangerous, deeply ill and potentially lethal it is to be a domineering, not dominant faux-dom or a subservient, not service-oriented faux-sub in a broader sociopolitical context of individual behavior.  His courage and prescience were unduly rewarded by the temporary triumphs of Nazism and Stalinism and, later, imprisonment by Uncle Sam, who burned crateloads of his books not long before he died in a taxpayer-subsidized cage.

     More personally speaking, I see BDSM everywhere because in various guises it is indeed everywhere we "see".  We may for the moment consign S/M and B & D to metaphysical cornertime, not as punishment but with a kindly promise to return to them later.  D/s is the closest thing to God I know, a gnostic epiphany encapsulated in two letters with a slash between them.  Power dynamics are the central organizing principles of the known universe.  If we accept the leather given that submissives actually possess at least half, if not more, of the power in any conscientious roleplay, then further analogies take shape before us in potentially limitless holistic manifestations.

     Physics itself embodies the science of D/s dynamics.  The sun is our alpha dom in this piece of astronomical real estate, the real play we inhabit.  Earth's moon expresses the power of submissive energy by moving our waters.  No dom exists in a vacuum.  The process of power exchange, erotic and otherwise, is interactive.  Mother Nature is the ultimate domme.

     Artists have ever struck tones of guardian beauty in service of religion and philosophy, whether they've been dogmatically atheistic or not.  They seduce their intended with aesthetic powers of persuasion and intimations of ecstatic release.  They beckon and resist, paint with chiaroscuro, leaven drama with levity and so forth.  So do dom/mes, and so do subs in a less explicit way.  Intensely sexual activity may be interspersed with and co-exist with states of asexual being.  Denial and delight may share the room in fond embrace rather than struggle.  Pain and pleasure may develop as photographic signatures on a continuum, the personalized imagistic poetry of sensation.  The electromagnetism that drives our natural realm can be stretched like silly putty into greater and lesser magnitudes.  Genitalia can be objectified as totemic idols, belittled or ignored entirely, or positioned anywhere between these two extremes.  Neotantric and other mindfully tender alternative methods of erotic power exchange are fully as D/s as the most outwardly vicious and brutal S/M encounters.  EPE can be a stiff chill envelope to push or a soft warm bed for snuggling or either or both.

     We in homo sapiens all tend to be homosexual, bisexual or heterosexual.  We also all tend to be dominant, switch (willing to roleplay either way) or submissive in our triad of power orientation.  It is more than a little oxymoronic to separate the active BDSM community from what is essentially an imaginary vanilla community.

     We all wear leather.  Even the vegans.  This fact is a real play, not a roleplay.   

     

The Daily Yarn/Preface: "CHICAGO SHANGHAI!" and "prompts"

     (This entry was posted Saturday, the time's inaccurate.)

     A fictional double feature will commence on this page one week from now.  While the two serials both explore the power dynamics of public ownership, one of the most transgressive and fascinating genres of BDSM living art, the stories and styles contrast radically and will hopefully feed from each other, creating equilibrium.

     Two strangers meeting alone heralds the impending abduction depicted in "CS".  "P" begins as the first facetime encounter between two cyber/phone intimates, taking place in a crowded fast food franchise.

     "CS", tho rough, is very silly and filled with sardonic banter.  The ringleader of the abduction makes incessant references to arcane pop culture, like a Tarantino wannabe.  "P" is very serious in tone, with heavy spiritual and psychological baggage omnipresent, cluttering up the joymix.

     The antagonist/dom in "CF" looks like geeky, early middle-aged me and talks and behaves a bit like I may during a "Mr. Brown" roleplay, accentuating the mean guy gimmick in an over the top fashion.  The antagonist/dom in "p" looks like the handsome and underrated movie actor Adam Beach and sounds like nobody.  However, this character Trevor strategizes the way IM (Intermediate Master) James Otto may during a heavy psychological scene--a mindfuck scene, that's easier and more poetic to say than a five-syllable chunk of academic language--with a fictional but prototypically geeky, early middle-aged femsub-next-door.

     "CS" begins at Lake Michigan.  "P" ends at Lake Michigan.

     "CS" has no redeeming social value whatsoever and is a breeze of a yarn to spin.  "P" feels very emotional, as difficult for me to write as a heavy mindfuck scene can be to run.

     Mandy, the femsub/protagonist of "CS", is in her 20's, more than a trifle snooty, and very bioattractive; feel free to imagine she's the most gorgeous woman of your scurrilous dreams ("hotter than Joan Blondell" as Mr. Brown puts it, gleeful that no one else in the story knows or cares who that is).  Claudia, the femsub/protagonist of "p", has generally low self-esteem and her weight borders on the edge of morbid obesity.

     Once the abduction kicks into high gear, "CS" will be chock full o' graphic sex and ordeal humiliation.  These doms are clearly up to no good; why, they're no better than common hoodlums, and besides, they own everything.  As in a real mindfuck scene, "p" may or may not feature sex involving physical contact between the two characters.  What exactly Trevor needs and wants, besides control, will be a mystery to both Claudia and the reader as the story/scene progresses.

     "CS" would not really happen.  "P" could.

     "CS" will open this double feature due to the light-hearted nature of its depravity.  The first installment of "p", the arthouse-friendly main attraction, will be posted two weeks from to-day.  The two serials will then alternate unto completion.  There will be final chapters, each entitled "Aftercare", to mirror this preface.  

The Daily Week: White Slime (Don't Do It, Barry)

     It was a near miss--very close, indeed.  Closer than we may think at this juncture.  Yet, the better angels of our nature prevailed in the end.

     Barack Obama was nominated for the U.S. Presidency by the Democratic Party, and Shrillary, the Wicked Witch of Westchester County, dissolved into a putrid puddle.  She and Hubby's oh-so-subtly race-baiting press clips could never soak it up and resuscitate her, but we heard her cackle off in the ill distance that she'd be back, my pretty, as a bracing Rocky Mountain wind carried away that festering excuse for a soul.  

     Good Tuesday ain't even ten days old, tho, and good gosh a-mighty, there she is defiling our long-suffering video screens already.  Is there any thunder left in Valhalla the Clintons won't shamelessly covet?

     Most importantly, if Good King Barry ain't offering the High Priestess of Opportunism the audacious hope of snagging the first vacant Supreme Court seat, where she could at least put her law degree to some use and parenthetically bond over the agonies of sexual McCarthyism with Hubby's fellow martyr to said emotional plague Clarence Thomas (a one-man emotional plague himself)...why in blue blazes is he wasting his precious time with her in media-frenzied private conference?  This tete-a-tete is very offensive...

     Secretary of State, you say???  Gaaa-huh???  Would that be a reward for lying about that Bosnian crossfire she didn't endure?  Or would the sweetest plum on the Tree of Counselors acknowledge her complete irrelevance to the Northern Ireland peace process, Hubby's greatest achievement in eight years of office-sitting (when he wasn't facesitting that delectable Jewish plumper Mata Harriet of his)?  How does Bill Richardson, an eminently qualified potential Foggy Bottom potentate who put his chubby beaner ass on the line for Team Obama when it mattered, feel about the prospect of the eternally grating ingrate Shrillary hogging the diplobuzz to-day instead? 

     When will management permanently exclude this relentlessly cynical diva of despair, the ultimate unwanted plus-one, the guaranteed buzzkill spouse who'll scowl-dampen any festive gathering, from the guest list of international politics?  Why can't she skitter off into semi-obscurity on those clattering claws of hers, oversee federal funding assistance to reconstruction of the Tappan Zee Bridge and stick to shit like that in a dutiful manner, leaving the rest of us non-Empire Staters the fuck alone?

     I'll tell ya why, Skeezix.  Because she bitches and moans and plays the gender card whenever she doesn't get her way.  She's positively Sharptonesque and the other, more gifted broads in Washington, none of whom got there hanging for dear life from Hubby's necktie (none, that is, now that Liddy Dole's been consigned to pasture), don't squawk about it as they should have ever since the Pouty Princess of Park Ridge bum-rushed dozens of perfectly capable female would-be U.S. Senators from New York out of her way due to the faux power of her third name.

     Do you think if Guv Richardson or Mr. Holbrooke or the Other Ms. Rice or any qualified SoS prospect cries on camera and whines about having to eat pizza, the masses will demand their appointment instead?  Unlikely.  No one can stop the Goddess of Guilt-tripping when she points a crooked crone's finger and demands her satisfaction, even if that means presentation of State itself.  No one ever has, that is, except the President-elect and his creative team themselves.  

The Daily Verse: Haiku #1

the elevator

lurches, pulled by thick webbed fingers

towards the water tank

The Daily Spot/The Art of Psychopathology: Glitterbugs and Flounders

     While psychopathology does benefit from scientific research of all stripes and sociological data banks in particular, it is not a science.  It is a technique which is grounded in the sort of observational methodologies that inform constructive criticism.  It is an art form, and since no one in those wrong minds of the psych-industrial complex admits it is, the art of psychopathology is an orphan subculture.

     The interdisciplinary revolution that brought psychoanalysis to modern civilization has devolved into a loose but entrenched confederation of nonconsensual control freaks, soft-spoken scamsters as corrupted by the pharmaceutical industry as a bunch of Texas wardheelers gladhanding petty oil industry cash in unmarked envelopes.  Nuance, beauty and cultural awareness have been hammered out of the art of psychopathological diagnosis.  We feed addictive pills to schoolchildren to improve their job evaluations (report cards), inventing imaginary maladies to rationalize the pusherman's guilt.  The genuine maladies of socially induced maladjustment, what Al Gore and/or his ghostwriters termed in a more limited, political sense the "assault on reason", go undiagnosed because the onus of collective psychopathology must only apply to losers of wars and subcultural demons.  I'll explore the stultifying effects of magical thinking in later posts; I bring it up to consider that there is no way to medicate an entire populace in a marginally liberal republic and there is no way to make eye contact with hundreds of millions of individuals to see if many or most of them are psychotic.  Psychosis is fully as contagious as influenza, but most psychotics wear it between the lids.

     See,...see.  See.  Yes, that's it.  You don't need a sheepskin to look into a person's eyes and read them.  Moderate to severe psychosis can be observed by lay people who look without the aid of dsm-gazillion or any other mentor-approved canon.  Look into the eyes and read them.

     There are two basic psycho gazes and I call the afflicted unfortunates who bear them glitterbugs and flounders.  Glitterbugs have eyes that glitter as if twinkling with starlight, darting about like bugs racing for shadows after a light switches on when stress worsens the condition.  These eyes tend to be quite lovely, touching and sad.  Calm, rational eyes make for bland visuals in comparison.  Flounders on the other hand bear eyes utterly devoid of warmth, compassion, or any discernible human emotion beyond obscurely etched anger and resentment, which flares under stress and simmers in other times but never dissipates entirely.  Their eye contact will be as kinetic as a dead fish on grey ice.  

     Glitterbugs express not joy but unspeakable ecstasy when they're happy.  Flounders may throw back their hands and bark mirthless laughter when they're happy, squinting away the possibility of deep joy.  You can have a damn good time with a glitterbug to-nite but they may set a fire in your foyer to-morrow.  Life is a zero sum game to a flounder and unhealthy cynicism becomes as encrusted in their eyes as a century of sleep dirt.

     Charles Bukowski's old girlfriend, the one portrayed by Faye Dunaway in "Barfly" who looked more like a movie star than she does, was a glitterbug.  Donald Rumsfeld is a flounder.

     If you meet either glitterbug or flounder in an alley bright enough to read their eyes, greet them cordially to stay on their good side, then bid them a polite but firm adieu and keep your distance.  Don't trip over the eggshells on your way to the nearest choo choo train.

The Daily Rushes: Lola Montes, Man's Castle

     Cinema has terminal cancer.

     I once toured the Art Institute of Chicago with a friend who makes collages and builds houses.  The paintings there are placed chronologically.  When we left the rooms with works by the Dutch Masters, he told me, "It's all downhill from here."  There would be good, excellent, sometimes great paintings to come in the intervening centuries, but no Rembrandts or Vermeers tumbling effortlessly from state of the art visionaries on a consistent basis.

     It's all downhill for cinema after "Raging Bull".  There have been a few fistfuls of great movies since then but they run like sand between our fingers down, the tide of mediocrities come sooner than the almanacs promise to sweep our hopes of cinematic rejuvenation back beyond horizon.  When was the last time you felt a new movie changed your life?  After the nouveau waves from South Korea and the Philippines wash outland, which other atlas-plastered zone will tempt us like a foodie's favored trendy new cuisine?  Will it matter much beyond the specificities of trade winds?  Is Hollywood itself now the Old West it lionized, a weedy pocket of ghostly recollections whose artisans from Eastwood on down paint their crabbed, anointed visions in murky filters of graveyard desaturation?  

     O'er the last fortnight I witnessed two movies which reaffirmed my choice of cinema as the greatest of all possible art forms, at least until holograms who touch us physically inhabit terra firma.  One of them is 75 years old, happy anniversary, the other a sprightly 53.  As much as I love "Brokeback Mountain" and "Storytelling" and "Buffalo 66" and "Lost in Translation" and "There Will Be Blood" and a kiddie portion of other movies o'er the past decade, there is no conceivable way that the relative geniuses who molded these relative masterpieces could ever compete with the supernaturally astounding work of Max Ophuls and Frank Borzage and their venerable creative teams.  "Lola Montes" and "Man's Castle" deserve entire volumes of appreciative critical analysis.  They are better movies than "Citizen Kane" or "The Rules of the Game" or a gazillion other genuine or putative classics.  They show and tell us legends of human experience and sensory marvels.  Comparison with recent would-be classics, as wonderful and sweetly fresh as they have been, defies the cheesy craft of the simile.  

     I carry the "Man's Castle" ticket stub in my billfold like a beloved snapshot.  If the Music Box printed out their titles, I'd carry "Lola Montes" around with me as well and she could have a very lively D/s threesome with Spencer Tracy and Loretta Young.  "Buffalo 66" is one of the greatest movies of my experience, a re-invention of the art of video editing and the art of black comedy and a landmark in the study of postindustrial men's issues, but I can't carry Billy Brown around with me.  He needs a bath and I'm not invited to join him.  

     Virility and vitality fade.  Mother Nature dooms art as well as being.  Cinema will never bloom again.

     It may be argued that the aforementioned recent relative masterpieces were all birthed in the land Uncle Sam owns, and the blush of creative youth abounds overseas or downstream.  While I admire the work of cultural anthropologists, I witness movies as a parishioner in aesthetic dim cathedrals.  Show me a visionary product of any national cinema that changes us and alters our perception the way "Stagecoach" or "Sunrise" or "Beauty and the Beast" or "Sansho the Bailiff" or "Black Narcissus" did, and I'll once again feel passion from the movies in their decrepitude.  

     Cantankerous excellence persists in cinema, and will for centuries if not longer. Greatness does rarely, if ever.  Excellent painters continue to please us, great works of art no longer grace the walls of our contemporary galleries.  The antiseptic lodging scent of multiplexes will suffuse their offerings with sweet promises of deliverance, but we can't move into a hotel.  Cinema is dying, and we must plan to move beyond the denial stage to other forms of greatness in creative bloom.

          

The Daily Meme: Brain Machine

     A brain machine is, quite simply, a computer.

     As airplanes (flying machines) are patterned after organic avian designs, computers (brain machines) are patterned after organic neurological designs.

     "Brain machine" has three syllables, as does "computer", & it's much more poetic.

      In conversation, in correspondence, in wild fantasies that may come true...use it.  Make it a meme for our post-millennial dreams.

The Daily Dom: 52 Topics for Year 45

     We've only just begun & I've already missed a Daily Deadline, but that is to be expected as life intrudes.  I partook in three public movie discussions (one of which detoured into a BDSM discussion) o'er the week-end & that gave me little or no time to write in the dailyclam home office.

     "The Daily Dom" is intended for a general audience.  Active community members will find much of it to be old news & will disagree w/some of my conclusions & interpretations.  I'm an assimilationist & will maintain my out status as a domgeek & control freak thru thick & thin.  I hope "TDD" can function as a literary liaison between the BDSM & vanilla communities.

     I'm listing 52 topics w/BDSM-related themes for future posts in my 45th year.  I invite requests as I comb thru them o'er the course of 2k8-9.

1) The Aesthetics of BDSM:  Be a Personality Performance Artist, Feel Better 

2) The Aesthetics of BDSM:  Historical Storytelling, Nomenclature, Political Strategies

3) Assimilationism vs. Insularism:  Andrew Sullivan's "The Death of Gay Culture" Applied to BDSM

4) Barack Obama:  2k8 Dom of the Year

5) BDSM, Generations X & O & the Post-millennial Cultural Revolution

6) BDSM Triads:  Dominance & Submission, Bondage & Discipline, Sadism & Masochism

7) BDSM Triads:  Light, Medium, Heavy

8) BDSM Triads:  Magnitude, Roleplay, Archetype

9) BDSM Triads:  Needs, Curiosities, Limits

10) Being Able to Know the Difference

11) BOLEMAC Owns the World:  A Blueprint for Making History w/ BDSM Flash Mobs

12) Borderline Personality Disorder:  How to Recognize This Deadly Contagion that Directly Affects the BDSM Community

13) A Cosmic Blacklist Makes Our Power Dynamics Topsy-Turvy:  Otto Preminger's "Whirlpool"

14) Dr. Lamb's Therapeutic Dominance:  A Mix of Cognitive & Client-Centered Approaches

15) Dynamics of Power in Dance Choreography

16) Edgeplay, Fear of Topping and Scotty's Lil' Fuckdoll:  the BDSM World of Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo"

17) Elements of a Domgeek

18) femcar:  2k8 Sub of the Year

19) FloridaDom, 2nd Runner-up, 2k8 Dom of the Year

20) Heavy Degradation, Hollywood Style:  Michael Ritchie's "Prime Cut"

21) Hollywoods' Greatest BDSM Work of Art:  Frank Borzage's "Man's Castle"

22) How Bigotry against BDSM Helped Elect Obama, & Other Tales Torn from To-day's Headlines

23) How the Totalitarian Wing of Second Wave Feminism Drove Mainstream BDSM Underground

24) If You Could Bring One Object (besides a slave) to a Desert Island Scene, What Would It Be?

25) Incorporating Chance into a Scene

26) Intruder Scenes & the Joy of Heavy Mindfucking

27) It's OK to Laugh:  Powerplay as Farce in Todd Solondz's "Storytelling"

28) Joe Biden, Dungeon Monitor

29) John McCain:  Runner-up, 2k8 Sub of the Year

30) Limitations of Efficacy:  Toys & whether to Use Them in a Mindfuck Scene

31) Mental Domspace & the Literature of Transgression:  Hubert Selby's "The Room"

32) 1955's Abuse & Consent Domnoir Double Feature:  Robert Aldrich's "Kiss Me Deadly" & Joseph H. Lewis' "The Big Combo"

33) Pastor Leonard Cohen's BDSM Hymnal

34) The Performance Art of the BDSM Presenter

35) Power Games of a Balding Venus:  Jean Genet's Dynamic Journey 

36) The Power of Natural Beauty & the Irresistible Mr. Dom in the Archers' "Black Narcissus"

37) Pro Wrestling:  BDSM for Children & Teenagers

38) Racheal Ray, 2nd Runner-up, 2k8 Sub of the Year

39) Robert Wise's "Born to Kill":  the Hills Are Alive w/ the Sound of Domming

40) Sarah Palin:  Runner-up, 2k8 Domme of the Year

41) "Scarlet Street": Pushing the Envelope of Erotic Humiliation w/ Master Fritz Lang

42) Sensory Balance, Deprivation & Overload during a Scene

43) The Serial Misinterpretations of David Lynch's "Blue Velvet"

44) Simon Says, Kitty Cat, Richie Cunningham and Other Light D/s Roleplays

45) The Spiritual Poetry of Dehumanization

46) Storytelling:  the Art of Developing a Mindfuck Narrative

47) The Strategic Devaluation of the Myth of the Golden Opportunity

48) Strategizing an Abduction Scene

49) Tailormaking Roleplays to Suit Personalities

50) The Unique Challenges of Accepting Service

51) Using the Quotidian World in a Mindfuck Scene

52) The Visionary Hybrid BDSM Porn of Jake Malone

The Oncely Intro

     Welcome to the dailyclam home office.  Pleased to meet you.  Wipe your feet.  No no, not there, on my temp slave in the corner.  Anywhere on her's fine.  Don't worry, like Jean Harlow's Red-headed Woman, she likes it.  

     Thedailyclam will offer a different category topic for each day of the week.  Here they are...

     Sunday:  The Daily Dom...in which I explore the topic of BDSM in a platform that can be observed by both civilians and active community members.  The definition of the term "BDSM" is fully as expansive as, say, the definition of the term "art".  BDSM, and D/s in particular, serves as the foundation of my philosophy, the strength of my spirituality, and the joy of my sexual orientation.  I prognosticate that It will also go mainstream in the 21st Century the way LGBT went mainstream in the 20th; in fact, 75% of the major party prez & veep candidates this year held major BDSM magnitude.  Don't be afraid--no, be a little afraid, it's more fun that way.

     Monday:  The Daily Meme...in which I make my own stout-hearted attempt to introduce fresh ideas, concepts, words and/or phrases into the cultural bloodstream.  The Meme Bank never closes in an economic disaster but it is designed specifically to grease the wheels for mergers and acquisitions.

     Tuesday:  The Daily Rushes...in which I analyze my favorite art form, cinema, using a multidisciplinary approach.  Cinema has been dying since 1981 but I'll try to keep it alive in our cultural memories and point out the occasional efforts at rejuvenation.

     Wednesday:  The Daily Spot...in which I examine certain fascinating orphan subcultures which will be fully accepted as legitimate art forms in the near future, the way the image of comic books evolved from the dumpsters of mockery to the altars of middlebrow reverence.  Pro wrestling since the mid-1990's and porn since 2k3 have been, at their best, exemplary models of the orphan subculture ascendant.

     Thursday:  The Daily Verse...in which I return to the literary form most writers begin and often end their careers with, poetry.  Serious lit-crafters are well-advised to at least occasionally return to this timeless form, which is to writers what the rudiments are to drummers.

     Friday:  The Daily Week...in which I don the dunce cap of punditry, firmly plant teeth in cheek and thumb in temp slave's mouth and pontificate about recent current events.  This is ideal for the day Daily Show/Colbert takes off, Bill Maher comes on, and Washington/Wall St. quietly releases ill tidings for the slow Saturday news cycle.

     Saturday:  The Daily Yarn...in which I spin tales in what could be a variety of optional formats in fiction.  I may combine several at once; a short story may suddenly become a screenplay the next week and a soliloquy for the stage the following week.  Doms love to sow seeds of chaos, observing from the control tower like Hitchcock's "Birds" dispassionately surveying the fiery filling station. 

That is all for to-day.