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.

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     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.