Shriveling, like a spider under a hot lamp

It just dawned on my that Virgin is closing. Granted, I'd already been there at least once since the discount signs went up, but it just registered with me today -- cons slicking the pavement right in front -- that it will be gone. It's one of those weird demarcation points I'm experiencing in SF in my tenth year here, and it was brought on by wondering what the hell is going to fill its space.

And the realization: nothing. Not for awhile.

CompUSA died. Circuit City died. Red Box is either closed or on life support. Tower and now Virgin. Some of these are places I gave a shit about, others just happened to exist but I wouldn't take the time to spit on the pavement in front of them out of their relative insignificance.

But Virgin -- I spent a shitload of time there. Not that it was anything respectable. It was overpriced, full of itself and generally a tourist trap. But it was also a great place to get DVDs and had a respectable jazz and classical selection, and I wasted quite a few lunch breaks there throughout the years. And now, seeing the sign that all the marketing bullshit is now on sale, it sort of gets driven home.

Pity the corpse of Virgin. Pity the phoenician San Francisco. Nobody likes to watch a bird while it's burning.

The Teachings of Donnie B.

Here's an amazing argument in the most recent copy of the New Yorker, taken from an article about Donald Barthelme's place in the postmodernist canon:

What killed that distinction [between high and commercial art] wasn't defining pop art up [to the level of high art]. It was defining high art down. It was the recognition that serious art, too, is produced and consumed in a marketplace. The point of [Andy] Warhol's Campbell's soup-can paintings was not that a soup can is like a work of art. It was that a work of art is like a soup can: they are both commodities.

This was courtesy of Louis Menand, and it blew my fucking mind. Not for the observation of it, which is a trivial distinction. What mindfucked me was the way it put so succinctly an essential complaint I have had with a mood permeating the circles I've been around.

What does this really mean? Essentially, Warhol's soup cans brought the world to its logical summation. It's kitsch. Cultural criticism mistaken as artistic relevance. It's not constructive but nihilistic. And that's not the world want to live in. It's a dead outlook.

If art is not striving to find at least the odd, the weird dissonances associated with everyday life and find some type of tether between them, then all it really is is a pretty little trifle. We don't feel it, we don't need it. It isn't essential in the way that food, fucking and -- for some -- religion is. Maybe for all -- I've always held that Modernists biggest failure was the path they took to make art the new religion, and therefore as essential as Sunday Mass was to the 1300s.

With its push to emphasis on titillation and the superficial, the contemporary era essentially pulled high art and art in general to the levels of porn, minus the stache or what have you. It's all superficial -- and not even satisfactorially animalistic -- fucking. It's not attempting to be anything else.

So here's my ultimate manifesto:

If you're looking at a piece of street art, ask the fundamental question "So what?" With any gallery opening or new track of music: "So what?" Any film: "So what?" What else did the work bring to the table? What was this looking to do to me or change or mold or push or punch or spit on me?

Not everything is going to be effective here, but shit if you're not going to find -- if the artist is taking his audience seriously and not just completely absorbed in his- or herself -- that incrementally you have changed. Your life, whatever. Your outlook, your world view has been altered in such a way that you eventually look at yourself and say "I can't go back now." Even if it's not apparent what the "what" is, there's still a "what" that has already happened. And it's unsettling, in a good way.

Faithful readers, I promise not to talk your head off in the next one. I'll find some toilet humor for next time.

And now a note from your friendly neighborhood tenderloin resident

I get home last night, and granted I'm a bit tipsy as a result of a Valentine's Day that was mercilessly locked in singleness. Stumble through the apartment, jump on the computer and make a pizza. Go to the window for a quick smoke.

So as a point of reference, I live across from the Phoenix Hotel. Literally I overlook the parking lot and have an angle on four of the rooms that face it. Of course you had the regular emotional outcrying, the drunken aborted near-blows, the dealers staying clear because it's in their best interest to just stand by and laugh. And one room, a spotlight shining out, I do a double-take when I realize there's a couple going at it doggy-style.

Of course I do the natural thing and grab my binoculars. I size them up.

I have to throw in caveat upon caveat here. I am not a pervert (at least, not this type). I respect people's privacy and have no problem looking the other way if I happen to catch a glimpse of something that was meant to be a private event, private gesture or private otherwise.

But please, people. I'm also a red-blooded male, as well as a study of human nature and necessity, and it's not like it isn't obvious that there is a full set of apartments right within eyeshot. If you're in a city, close your fucking drapes! I don't care if you're twenty stories up, pull the fucking drapes. Now I'm on the fourth floor, the phoenix is only two stories, and here are these two people going at it. If they're going to be that fearless, I'm not going to give a shit.

After about four minutes, they got the hint.

So how was it? Mechanical. I got the impression watching them that, for all the seeming enjoyment and energy, there was no connection. It was fucking, and not even animal fucking. These two people either had never met before or, if they had, don't know a thing about each other.

That, and in spite of the fact the woman still had her dental floss on -- merely pulled aside for the activity -- she was completely uninteresting.

The ritualistic Saturday death spiral

As some of you may know, I waste my saturdays watching Sci-Fi, movies descended from an absolute pile of dreck. Upon occasion you might get a feature film that had some sort of official release (seriously, though, how did Bloodrayne and its sequel get a full release?), but the usual fare doesn't stray far from the in-house productions. And what a team they are.

I am personally convinced that the SciFi studios must have an army of six-year-olds thinking up this shit. I mean, how many movies can you see about raptors and pterodactyls and giant squids? The most recent example: Attack of the Sabertooths, a shitty take-off on Jurassic Park, but with the sexier, far more intriguing concept of -- wait for it -- sabertooth tigers. Rocking.

But then it gets more twisted than that. See, the movies are thought up in a day care facility, but the damned things have so much crappy blood effects that you might as well be watching slaughterhouse footage. Who exactly is the intended audience? When I was old enough to savor guts splattered across the screen, I had long graduated from anything to do with dinos. (okay, so I was playing forgtotten worlds and phantasy star II on my sega genesis, but who's really asking?) I wanted something terrifying, like zombies or vampires or werewolves or something.

Oh wait, they have those weekends to. I'll shut up now. And drink my coffee.

A&P

I had a very short relationship with John Updike. I know, a great man of American letters, he was marvelously productive career. But I never read the novels, not the Rabbits or the Witches or really anything else save a few short stories. And maybe this explains my relatively messed up outlook on the world literature, but essentially I do end up getting a lot of my general judgments through my relationship to shorts. Whatever. I will shamelessly stick to that, understanding that the the bulk of the reading world holds writers more to their novelistic achievements versus work in the shorter, more direct and hybridized form. (quick bit of gm/sf lit theory: because of the limitations of style, the weight of each word in a short more often approaches the rules of poetry, but I'm digressing and not caring much.)

Anyway, my first taste of Updike was in a non-counting English course on Short fiction back at the University of Delaware. The story: "A&P." Funny enough, it's online, so read it and enjoy:
http://www.tiger-town.com/whatnot/updike/

So of that generation, what's left? Vonnegut is long dead. Bellow passed, probably swatting the Grim Reaper in the nose on the way out. Stanley Elkin -- whose A Poetics for Bullies stands as one of my favorite shorts, period -- has been relegated to obscurity. Philip Roth now seems intent on only writing about the inevitable, to varying (mostly bad) degrees of success.

Well, in some ways it's about time. I would comment more, but the entire damned generation in some ways, while hitting a lot of the realistic flaneur notes (Thanks, James Wood), ultimately created a body of work that never punched me in the gut, with the few noted exceptions. That's my $0.02, but frankly for all its histrionics a lot of it felt flat. Whatever. A pure stylist can be decent but is ultimately lacking in emotional heft, a champion of the people dates him- or herself the second the words are put to page, a culture-specific icon can ultimately only go so far as the confines of cultural experience will allow: everything else will seem alien and somehow lack the all-important cultural punch to an Auslander of that culture. It's still going on, and at some point it's all navel-gazey, anyyway.

Okay, that was a tangential rant, my apologies if you all started to zone out there. My last image of Updike: on Charlie Rose a few weeks back, he was describing what it was like to revisit the Witches of Eastwick for his most recent title. And it was almost sad to watch somebody who I'd held in some esteem try to talk about lesbianism, etc. on a talk show. He sounded like a cross between a dirty old man and the prudish schoolnun. It's a weird combo, but he pulled it off. (btw, sorry about not being able to embed -- here's a link to the clip:
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/9495)

So I lost my train of thought after that one. Guess I shouldn't be so surprised -- I've probably bored the shit out of all you all anyway. Time for more coffee.

facebook has ruined my brain (or, the nerd blog to end all blogs)

I think facebook has ruined my brain. Not in the same way that say bourbon/beer chaser corrodes the thing, but the damned thing has made it so I can only seem to write in five word increments. Thank you headlines.

Before, I was able to compose somewhat cogent paragraphs, now, I'm thinking in sentences, short little snippets of info mixed with snark and sarcasm, little tiny quips to alleviate any literary itch. I had a hard time writing that sentence. I still don't think it works.

In other news:
Geof, the proverbial rocket scientist, just commented completely by accident on an anonymous website, which will invariably mean I get the pleasure of deleting/ignoring more spam in my inbox come tomorrow. (aside: worst new pickup line "Want a little spam in your inbox?")

The scenario -- friend dave posted a link to an album of movie themes, courtesy of Geoff Love and His Orchestra. Thinking I was commenting on his blog, I threw out the comment "Damn, I have to change my porn name now." Only I wasn't commenting on his blog. He had warned me about this.

Haha. (face forces a laugh, then just as suddenly goes slack and cold) I am a nerd. I don't even hide it well.

red light special: intelligentsia personals

From the back of the New York Review of Books:

Erotic Explosion. Let me blow your mind, your ultimate erogenous zone. Provocative talk with educated beauty. No limits.

So let me ask, because I can and will do so:
1) I'm assuming the topic of conversation is not going to be phrenology.
2) you know what, let's stop at one.

Is anybody else as amused by this as I am? Somehow I want to get involved in this racket. My sample add:

Mentally Dextrous. Nimble charlatan will tickle and test your depths. Clean, discreet, available for bah mitzvahs.

Yup. Think I might submit that one.