Shovelware

"Everything's Got a Moral, If Only You Can Find It."

Alice Liddell, the "Alice" in Alice in Wonderland, photographed by C.L. Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll).

Two new essays, both pegged on Tim Burton's Alice, each taking subtly different (though hardly contrariwise!) angles of analytical attack.

In the Las Vegas Weekly, I've published "What's inside the hatter? The surprising significance of the top hat, in Alice and other wonderlands." It's a meditation on the deeper meanings of the Mad Hatter and his hat, featuring a lengthy digression on the social history of the top hat.

Teaser:

Consciously or not, Tim Burton hints that the Mad Hatter is [Alice author C.L.] Dodgson's funhouse-mirror reflection. His Hatter has CGI doll-eyes, larger than life and slightly cockeyed for that zany effect; Dodgson's eyes were asymmetrical. And he always wore a top hat. Depp reads his character as "hypersensitive"; Dodgson was painfully sensitive in social situations, grateful for any little kindness, acutely conscious of slights. Depp's Hatter needs "to travel into another state, another personality, to be able to survive," the actor says. Dodgson, too, lived a double life. He was chloroform in the classroom, a humorless bore tripped up by his stutter. In the company of the beautiful "little misses" he worshipped as icons of innocence, however, his stammering vanished and he morphed "into another state, another personality," transforming into a charming joke-teller and talespinner of endless ingenuity. His dean's daughter Alice Liddell was one such girl; for her, he free-associated the story that would later become Alice in Wonderland, dreaming it out loud as they rowed along the river on a drowsy summer's day.

Over at True/Slant, I've posted "Coming of Age in Wonderland: Burton's Alice, Depp's Hatter, Carroll's Dreamchild," a related, yet far from redundant, essay, theorizing Depp's Hatter as one of the "beautiful boys" (bishonen) in Japanese manga (graphic novels) for teenage girls, and tying that analytical thread around the tweenage-girl cult that worships Johnny Depp and Carroll's own obsession with 10-year-old girls such as Alice Liddell.

Teaser:

"Tarted up with bruise-purple eyeshadow and grenadine-red lipstick,
Depp's Hatter is an emo-punk dream of adorable weirdness, packaged for the Hot Topic shopper. He'd totally let you give him a celebrity makeover, and when he looks at Alice with those lost-puppy eyes and says, "Why is it you're always too small or too tall?," you just know he's talking to you. That's why Avril Lavigne---and every tweenage girl in the audience---wants to have tea with him (as Lavigne does in the video for her song "Alice"), not Wasikowska's palely loitering Alice."

Reeling and writhing, HERE and HERE.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a.k.a. Lewis Carroll.

The Man Who Souled the World

"I'm closer to the Golden Dawn/ immersed in Crowley's uniform of imagery..." Left, Aleister Crowley, celebrity spokesmodel of the hermetic magick order, the Golden Dawn. Right, D.B. in his Queen-of-the-Nile Phase. Later, he would complete the intertextual circuit by embracing Elizabeth "Cleopatra" Taylor as his mother confessor, during the Lost Hollywood Years ('75-'76). Found online.

The latest installation of my epic personal essay-cum-cultural critique-cum-religious studies doctoral dissertation on religious imagery in David Bowie's music, Bowie fandom as a Warholian mystery cult (whatever that means), the Deeper Meanings of Ziggy, and the historical backdraft from the Jesus Freak movement that swept America (including this Young American) in the '70s, is LIVE, NOW, over at Religion Dispatches. READ IT HERE.

Praying to the Aliens

Every Friday, Religion Dispatches, an online magazine of cultural commentary on religion, is running excerpts from my essay on Bowie's flirtations with Buddhism, Nietzchean atheism, Crowleyite magick, Christianity, and Kabbala; the religious subtext in Bowie's lyrics; the christological symbolism in Ziggy Stardust; and, on a more personal note, my '70s transition from evangelical true believer to devout Bowiephile.

Short Version: It's about Bowie and religion, and Bowie AS religion.

Read the first installment HERE.

The Politics of Sports, Part II

((UPDATE: Okay, so most readers took one look at that 5,000-word behemoth of a post (on True/Slant, blogged below) and fled in puckered terror. A Teachable Moment. Happily, in these post-Gutenbergian times, the writer is able to wade back in with a scythe and clear a wider path to the finish line. Which I did, weed-whacking this thing from 5k down to, like, 3k-something. Not exactly a Tweet, I'll grant you, but more manageable by far. Second chance?))

Just rolled out the sequel to my earlier TRUE/SLANT post on the gender politics of the Super Bowl and the fine line between homosociality and homosexuality in jock culture. (Part I is HERE.)

Read "A Locker-Room Rap with Coach Chomsky: The Politics of Sports, Part II," HERE.

Mother of Cthulhu, this thing is GINORMOUS. I've GOT to get the hang of blogging shorter. This essay started off reasonably enough, but ended up looking like Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis's idea of a doctoral dissertation---5,098 words, FFS. Now I'm petrified no one will read the misbegotten thing. (If you do, bring bottled oxygen.) Anyway, my apologies in advance. If you are foolhardy enough to wade into this thing, please feel free to pelt me with batteries and beer bottles from the comment thread. That's what it's for.

For the time-starved, here's the nut graf:

In their rippingly readable Better to Reign in Hell: Inside the Raiders Fan Empire, an instant classic of gonzo ethnography, the husband-and-wife team of cultural critics Jim Miller and Kelly Mayhew stand Chomsky's critique of the social role of sports on its head. Penetrating to the silver-and-black heart of Raider Nation, Miller and Mayhew reveal it, through Studs Terkel-style oral histories and first-person storytelling, as mostly (though not entirely) working-class, surprisingly multiracial and multi-ethnic, and more politically diverse than the stereotypical image of the right-wing lumpendude bellowing "USA! Number One!" during the Super Bowl's fighter-plane flyover would have us believe.

Dead Letters

Luc Sante, Folk Photography: The American Real-Photo Postcard, 1905-1930 (Verse Chorus Verse/Yeti).

Read my essay "Ghostcards," on Luc Sante's new book, Folk Photography, on the Las Vegas Weekly website, HERE.

Nut graf:

To Sante, these [early 20th century] postcards constitute a "ghost telegraph," as he told a radio interviewer. In Folk Photography, he writes, "The real-photo card was typically a product of the small town, particularly the small town isolated on the plains, whose newspaper did not have the capacity to reproduce half-tones, and whose lonely citizens felt an urgent need to communicate with absent friends, distant in those days even if they lived only three stops down the railroad line." Like the blues, field hollers, chain-gang songs and other folkways of Old Weird America, real-photo postcards served as a social network, a kind of Basement Tapes of the backwoods unconscious, reporting local news, memorializing personal tragedies, scrapbooking sentimental moments.
[R]eal-photo cards...captured throwaway personal moments: two nattily bowtied little boys, a girl, and a pup straight from the Little Rascals casting call, seated on a lawn, framed by the shoes of the guy taking their portrait from a prostrate position. Or moments fixed in agony: an iron-faced woman, her jaw set in resignation, her baby---dead, by all appearances---limp on her lap. (Postmortem portraits were part of the American way of death well into the 20th century.)
Some of the cards in Folk Photography freeze-frame tableaux whose backstories have been misplaced, enigmatic scenes in search of a plot, like the---abandoned? ransacked?---office, its walls stripped bare, detritus heaped on the floor. Or the skin-pricklingly creepy photo of two pathetic grotesques, tarred and feathered and captured for posterity by the camera's implacable gaze. In the background, a blurry figure hides his face with his hands.

Luc Sante, Folk Photography: The American Real-Photo Postcard, 1905-1930 (Verse Chorus Verse/Yeti).

More, HERE.

Tight End

Awesomeness: I'm now a contributing blogger to the content-rich (but seemingly glitch-ridden) blog portal, True/Slant.

My page is HERE.

My first post, "Jocko Homo: How Gay is the Super Bowl?," a Queer Theory-for-the-Straight-Eye take on the super bowl, jock culture, and Masculinity in America, is now up. Drop by and nail a comment to the wall, if you're so inclined. (The more comments I get, the more link love and re-Tweets I get, the more marquee play I'll get on the front page, I assume.)

NUT GRAF FOR THE ATTENTION-DEFICIT DEMOGRAPHIC:

Our long national nightmare is over. By "nightmare," I mean the drumroll of breathless speculation, ESPN stat porn, and news-anchor joshing about who's going to be whose daddy that culminates in that Great Event in the History of Our Times, the Super Bowl. By "our," I mean those millions of Americans who would rather undergo a trans-orbital leucotomy with an icepick than the protracted brain death of pre-game hype, when our cultural conversation is pre-empted by a live feed from the jock unconscious of Team America.
It may come as Piss Christ blasphemy to many, but there are those of us who Truly Do Not Give A Flaming Fuck who finished last in the league in rushing the ball or who led the league in defending tight ends or who had a hot flash during red-zone play-action passes (although that does sound provocative, now that you mention it).
Not that anyone asked us. During the run-up to Super Bowl Sunday, anchorclones, talkshow hosts, politicians, and the rest of the chattering class act as if we're one big happy congregation gathered in solemn veneration of the Gipper's jockstrap, displayed in a monstrance. It's the sheer presumptuousness of the sports-crazed majority that galls the unbeliever most---an obliviousness to the possibility, even, that not everyone shares the One True Faith. It's the same genial arrogance that makes evangelical Christians so monumentally irritating to those of us who prefer a good exfoliating body scrub to being Washed in the Blood of the lamb. (The religious reference is apt: in our national religion, sports is one aspect of the Holy Trinity, the other two being the Free Market---whose invisible hand, like God's, moves in mysterious ways, but always for the betterment of all---and Christianity, which in the American vernacular is a bizarre amalgam of self-help pep talk, Left Behind doomsaying, and theocratic fascism). From the gridiron metaphors in your pastor's sermon to the scripted locker-room banter of local TV newsdudes, joshing about who's gonna open a can of whupass on who, to the Fantasy Games geek at the office watercooler maundering on about who "had six touchdowns and no interceptions in 12 pass attempts this season, posting a 124.3 passer rating, while outside of the red zone his rating on play-action was only 79.7 and his five touchdowns have to be measured, after all, against nine interceptions"(actual ESPN quote), the assumption that every red-blooded American---or at least every red-blooded American guy who isn't a wussy---would give his Truck Nutz for Superbowl tickets is as unconsidered as it is ubiquitous.

Image found on the Web; copyright holder unknown.

COPYFIGHT CLUB

WHAT: "World's Fair Use Day," a series of micro-lectures (mine is 10 minutes, at the presenters' request), panels, and film screenings about Fair Use "and its importance to innovators and creators," brought to you by "Public Knowledge, a Washington D.C.-based non-profit, consumer-advocacy group that works on issues relating to intellectual property, Internet protocol and information policy."

WHEN:

Tuesday January 12, 2010 in Washington, D.C.

WHERE:

The Newseum, which is located at 555 Pennsylvania Ave. NW (walking distance from the Judiciary Square Red Line Metro). Enter the Newseum using the entrance on 6th Street. Upon entering, look for the WFUD signs.

I'm speaking sometime between 2:50 and 4 P.M. on the stipulated subject of the Copyfight and "the repurposing of existing and/or copyrighted works in the world of culture jamming," part of "a 'speed panel,' which will consist of short presentations from other panelists.'"

Also on the bill are Mark Hosler of Negativland and Chris Burke of This Spartan Life.

DETAILS HERE, AT OFFICIAL WEBSITE.

Hail, Santan!

The vast Santanic conspiracy: Is St. Nick the tool of a plot too monstrous to mention?

Illustration by Scott Ramsoomair, copyright Scott Ramsoomair.

The Las Vegas Weekly just published my Santa-and-Satan: separated-at-birth? essay, the seed DNA for the lecture I'll be delivering at Observatory in Brooklyn in mid-January.

Nut Graf:

Christian soldiers, marching as to war in the pitched battle for the meaning of Christmas, worry that Santa is a tool of the vast Satanic conspiracy. To be sure, the similarity of their names, identical but for one transposed letter, is provocative. Didn't Mia Farrow use a Scrabble board, in Rosemary's Baby, to expose her grandfatherly neighbor with the flyaway eyebrows for the warlock he was, shuffling the letters of his name to reveal his true identity? Could the Religious Wrong be right, just this once? Is Santa the Deceiver's way of hijacking the Christ child's birthday? Kriss Kringle is a corruption of the German dialectal Christkindl, "little Christ child." Were Satan and Santa separated at birth?

If this sounds like yet more secular-humanist hatin' on Christmas, don't take my word for it. Outing Santa as a Manchurian Candidate for the Satanist agenda is a cottage industry among hardline evangelicals like the folks over at CuttingEdge.org ("Spiritual Insights into the New World Order so Startling You'll Never Look at the News the Same Way Again!"). Dearly Beloved, they're just wall-eyed with fear at the thought of the Boy Scouts' hidden ties to Freemasonry and the "encroaching mind-control of the Illuminati" and---oh, dear god, it's almost too mind-shrivelingly monstrous to mention---the "genetic scientists" who are "creating a super hybrid man/beast, eradicating death so man can live eternally without a savior!!" They know the Awful Truth about Santa, too, and they're exposing this "counterfeit Jesus" for the Satanic sham he is: "Together with the numerous other signs of the End of the Age," says a page on the ministry's website, "this love of the Pagan (Druidic) Santa Claus is just one more clear sign of the end." America, awake!

Found on the Web.

More about the Red Menace HERE.

Receiving Transmission from David Bowie's Nipple Antennae

Illustration: Toby Thane Neighbors. Copyright Toby Thane Neighbors.

My essay springboarding off Mark Spitz's new Bowie biography---called, for some incalculable reason, Bowie: A Biography---is live at the Las Vegas Weekly.

Attention Conservation Synopsis: Ideas discussed include boomer Bowiemania, The David's effect on male-boomer notions of the heteronormative, the Death of the '60s/Birth of the '70s, Why Glam Rock is Not Only More Profound Than You Know But More Profound Than You Can Know, and, crucially,

How did a snaggletoothed twink with a larval pallor, the physique of a stick insect and shaved eyebrows (for that transgendered mantid effect) became the improbable object of one-handed fantasies for millions of "boys and girls and everything in between," as Ziggy photographer Mick Rock puts it?

Nut Graf:

What makes Bowie's story fascinating is the dissonances between the plastic idol and the mousy-haired earthling who plays him. As the Thin White Duke of his 1976 Station to Station tour, Bowie was the brilliantined, clench-jawed embodiment of Weimar nightcrawler cool, a curlicue of smoke wisping off his ever-present Gitane. But the same man, in his earlier days, worshipped the leprously uncool Anthony Newley, a fixation immortalized in "The Laughing Gnome," a chipmunk-voiced novelty song calculated to make even the staunchest Bowiephile cringe. The same Bowie who pushed the envelope of pop by using William S. Burroughs's cut-up method of collage composition to generate lyrics like "you're dancing where the dogs decay, defecating ecstasy" ("We are the Dead," Diamond Dogs) would pass the schmaltz on Bing Crosby's Merrie Olde Christmas, dueting with Der Bingle on "Little Drummer Boy."

More here.

Satan and Santa: Separated at Birth? CANCELLED!

TONIGHT'S LECTURE HAS BEEN CANCELLED AND WILL BE RE-SCHEDULED FOR EARLY JANUARY. Reports of the Mother of All Blizzards, which is predicted to dump up to 20 inches of snow across the Northeast, have dissuaded me from braving gale-force winds and man-eating snowdrifts. Somehow, the thought of fishtailing all over the Garden State Parkway or, alternately, marooned in Grand Central doesn't appeal. Nor would I wish that on any attendee devout enough to risk such hazards. Let's try again in early January, shall we?

But if you are in the area and easily able to attend the Observatory's Krampus party, please do! Host Joanna Ebenstein writes to say that the "Observatory Krampus-Themed Holiday Party, inspired by our favorite Christmas character, Krampus, St. Nicholas' mischievous/evil Eastern-European sidekick," still very much ON. "We had planned to begin the party at the end of Dery's lecture, but will now begin at 8:00 PM, to amuse the disgruntled masses who did not recieve this cancellation alert. The party is free of charge, and will feature live-music (Krampus-Carols!) by Ruprecht and the Birch Switches, holiday gifts, birch-switch-beatings, treats, rusty chains, lolling tongues, and, of course, booze. Entrance to the party is free, but do bring cash for buying drinks, treats, & holiday gifts!"

"How the Lord of Misrule became a Bourgeois Tool (And Still Managed to Enrage the Religious Right)"

DETAILS:

LOCATION: OBSERVATORY, BROOKLYN. DIRECTIONS HERE.

Date: Saturday, December 19th

Time: 8:00

Admission: $7

WHAT: An illustrated lecture, followed by a Festivus---er, Observatory Holiday party, "complete with lovely alcoholic beverages, themed snacks, and live music as performed by Brooklyn's own Ruprecht and The Birch Switches, who will perform your favorite Krumpus Carols."

Few Americans know that Santa descends from the mock king who held court at Saturnalia, the Roman festival celebrating the winter solstice. Or that he shares cultural DNA with the Lord of Misrule who presided over the yuletide Feast of Fools in the Middle Ages---lewd, blasphemous revels that gave vent to underclass hostility toward feudal lords and the all-powerful church.

By the late 19th century, Christmas in Manhattan was an excuse for the rabble to go wilding from door to door in upper-class neighborhoods, demanding booze and cash from terrified householders in exchange for an off-key (and sometimes off-color) yuletide song. In desperation, Washington Irving, Clement Clarke Moore, and other members of New York's cultural elite invented Santa Claus---and Christmas as we know it---as a means of domesticating the drunken revels of the dangerous classes. Their bourgeois myth was designed to channel lumpen unrest into a more acceptable outlet: a domestic ritual consecrated to home, hearth, and conspicuous consumption.

In "Satan and Santa: Separated at Birth?," Dery, a cultural critic and book author, takes a look at the Jolly Old Elf's little-known role as poster boy for officially sanctioned eruptions of social chaos, as well as his current status as a flashpoint in "the Christmas Wars"---cultural battles between evangelicals, atheists, conservatives, and anti-consumerists over the "true" meaning of Christmas. Along the way, Dery considers New Age theories that Santa is a repressed memory of an ancient Celtic cult revolving around red-capped psychedelic mushrooms; Nazi attempts to re-imagine Christmas---a holiday consecrated to a Jewish baby, for Christ's sake---as a pre-Christian invention of tree-worshipping German tribes, in some misty, Wagnerian past; and the suspicious similarities between Satan and Santa, connections that have fueled a cottage industry of conspiracy theories on the religious right.

He sees you when you're sleeping/ He knows when you're awake/ He knows when you've been bad or good/ So be good..for goodness' sake!

A Traveler's Companion to Hell (Naked Lunch Turns 50)

French public-service announcement, counseling safe sex in the age of AIDS. Found on the Web.

Who knew that whip-tailed scorpion boy from Aldebaran would morph, in flagrante, into the real thing? Must've been that bug powder we'd both been sniffing...

WHAT: The Las Vegas Weekly, an alternative newspaper, has just published my essay on the 50th anniversary of William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch .

TIME-CONSERVATION PULLQUOTE:

If Finnegans Wake crystallized the collage consciousness of industrial modernity, Naked Lunch presages the multitasking, mashed-up sensibility of our remix culture, where we always have at least a half-dozen windows open in our minds: "This book spills off the page in all directions, kaleidoscope of vistas, medley of tunes and street noises ..." In a laconic, corner-of-the-mouth drawl that crosses the St. Louis upper class into which he was born with the underworld whose brutal honesty was always more congenial to his cast of mind, Burroughs channels the comic-strip unconscious of American society in all its nightmare hilarity.

GRAF YOU SHOULDN'T BE READING WHEN YOUR BOSS WALKS PAST YOUR CUBICLE:

Fifty years on, Naked Lunch still delivers the gut-grabbing jolt of the autoerotic hangings that punctuate its pages, every death erection and post-mortem ejaculation described with a grim relish that walks the line between cry of conscience and shudder of fetishistic pleasure.

UPDATE: LINK LOVE FROM DAVID PESCOVITZ AT BOING BOING. (Thanks, David!)

It's the End of the World As We Know It...

Image: Public domain, thanks to the Powerhouse Museum Collection.

...and I feel fine.

So I wrote a drive-by critique, for H+ magazine, of the prevailing New Age fixation on 2012 as the zero hour for the Coming Singularity, allegedly predicted by the ancient Maya, when Time Shall be No More or we'll bear witness to a Global Shift in Human Consciousness, or the sight of the firmament rolling up like a scroll and the moon turning blood-red and frogs raining from the heavens, or...or...or...

...whatever.

Necessarily, it was severely constrained by the ADD wordlength that straitjackets most online publications, and by pop journalism's insistence on hanging ideas on a topical peg. That said, it was as substantive as space permitted, I thought, cutting to the quick of the issues at hand and zeroing in on the self-appointed spokesman of the 2012 movement, Daniel Pinchbeck, who (by my lights) is the poster child for all that's regrettable about the 2012 phenomenon and, by extension, the scientific and historical illiteracy of our times, part of a larger hostility toward critical thought and empirical evidence decried by Susan Jacoby in The Age of American Unreason.

Nut graph:

Much of the 2012 shtick is a light-fingered (if leaden-humored) rip-off of the late rave-culture philosopher Terence McKenn's stand-up routine, without McKenna's prodigious erudition, effortless eloquence, or arch wit, and Pinchbeck is no exception. For Quetzalcoatl's sake, if you're going to start a religion, at least invent your own cosmology. Even L. Ron Hubbard was canny enough to concoct a pulp theology for ham-radio enthusiasts out of leftover SF plots. But every time I see Pinchbeck's glum mug, regarding the world with a sort of forced bliss, I think: Would you buy a used eschaton from this man? (McKenna, by the way, knew which side his ectoplasm was buttered on. When I asked him, over dinner, why a man of his obvious intellectual nimbleness endured the saucer abductees and trance-channelers who plucked at his sleeve at New Age seminars, he rolled a knowing eye and replied, I thought wearily, that he owed his daily crust to "menopausal mystics" and thus had to suffer them, if not gladly.) But the worst of the 2012 bandwagon, epitomized by Pinchbeck's lectures and writings, is the blithe cultural arrogance and staggering anthropological ignorance evident in the movement's appropriation of Mayan beliefs and history.

Of course, no sooner did the piece go live than the tie-dyed Trolls of Unreason massed at the gates, pitchforks in hand, howling for my head, insistent that I was a Tool of the Hegemony, part of the vast media conspiracy to suppress the truth about 2012, or maybe just a mean-spirited hater who gets LULZ out of not braking for unicorns.

Feel the love in the H+ comment thread, and among the Boing Boing comments.

Of course, a stalwart few representatives of that endangered species, the secular-humanist freethinker, rallied 'round the Enlightenment standard. (See both comment threads)

Then, Pinchbeck himself joined the fray.

And I returned the favor.

What fascinates me, in the comment threads, is the a priori assumption, among defenders of New Age hypotheses about 2012 and knee-jerk Pinchbeck-istas, that a bunch of paleolithic priests could foretell a paradigm shift in global consciousness. Of course, this presumes the existence of precognition, the evidence for which could dance on the head of a single Burning Man zippie's amphallang. If that. The Bronze-Age credulity evident in this presumption staggers the mind. It reminds me of this video of Christopher Hitchens handing a panel of Christian-college faculty their heads. At the end, the home-schooled, flat-earth fundies in the crowd have their say, a Q&A that makes you want to weep tears of blood into your copy of Thomas Paine's Age of Reason. Time and again, members of the bewildered herd cite scripture in support of their views, seemingly unable to parse the notion that Hitchens. Doesn't. Accept. Scriptural. Authority. That's why they call him an atheist, for Christ's sake. Incredible. In my admittedly limited experience, 2012-ers evince a similar ability to think outside the epistemological thought-bubble of their own, no less magical thinking.

Back to 2012: What, exactly---the devil is always in the details---is this global shift in consciousness the New Age is always maundering on about? Even the psychotropic philosopher Terence McKenna (a kinder, gentler 2012-er, but at least a highly entertaining one, vastly more erudite than most) hedged his bets, telling me in an interview I did with him that one possible scenario for the coming eschaton was that it would be invisible to us, all-pervasive yet undetectable, like some sort of noetic radioactive fallout.

But if the Global Shift(TM) does happen, how would we detect it? As I note in the Boing Boing comment thread, Pinchbeck hypothesizes that 2012 will witness a transformation in global consciousness, which will, of course, be registered in "only one medium": consciousness itself, naturally, "the mercurial domain of our subjective and personal experience"---a concept of such vaporousness as to be unfalsifiable. Isn't that just a little too convenient? It reminds me of the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, which asserts that, while the essence of the communion wafer is transformed into the flesh of a 2100-year-old Jewish rabbi, those aspects of the sacrament that are apprehensible to the senses and, not incidentally, susceptible to scientific verification ("the accidents") remain unchanged, thus ensuring that the doctrine cannot, by definition, be disproven on the basis of material evidence (common sense is another matter)---a bit of theological footwork that dodges, or at least attempts to dodge, the bullet of atheist mockery, not to mention skeptical inquiry, however awkwardly. Pinchbeck's New Age waffle about a Plate-Tectonic Shift in Global Consciousness that will, uh, be measurable only in the luminiferous ether of the Global Consciousness (with what? A dream-catcher the size of the Very Large Array?) is a laughably transparent piece of rhetorical ass-covering.

In any event, it's your turn, now, if these things interest you in the least. (One doesn't assume...)

It's Too Late

As the only member of my southern San Diego bordertown's Class of '78 who was a card-carrying member of the Patti Smith fan club, I waited for Patti's vanishingly rare appearance in America's Finest City with the giddiness of an Opus Dei insider waiting for a papal audience.

Poster from May 16, 1978 Patti Smith concert, San Diego, CA. Author's collection.

In one of rock history's weirder harmonic convergences, the opening act for Patti's May 16, 1978 date at San Diego's California Theatre---a down-at-the-heel 1920's music hall hard by the transient hotels and tattoo parlors of the city's tenderloin---was Dixie rocker Les Dudek.

An hour or so before showtime, Patti materialized onstage, peering balefully into the auditorium. Les Dudek had cancelled, she growled, in a deader-than-deadpan New York accent that withered everything on contact. "If you got a problem with that, you can get your money back. But you gotta leave now. In the light. So I can see you. So I can see how much money I'm losin'." No one moved. Patti turned on her heel and, with an air of fuck-you-very-much satisfaction, disappeared through the slit in the stage curtains.

To fill the opening act-sized hole left by Les Dudek's unlamented departure, Patti introduced a last-minute replacement: "the guy who taught me how to write poetry," a lank-haired stick insect of a man whose skin was so luminously pale it seemed to glow. His name was Jim Carroll and this, I would later learn, was his first live reading with a rock band.

Carroll was a blur in my peripheral vision, one more frustrating delay before the Main Event. Near the end of Patti's set, she clambered off the stage, still singing, and walked up the theater's center aisle, bathed in the incandescent aura of the spotlight that followed her. Now. This was the time. Pushing my way down the row I'd been sitting in, I stepped into the aisle, face to face with Patti, and handed her a sheaf of poems I'd written, in my adolescent mind---a mind not unduly burdened by false modesty---a Work of Soul-Crushing Beauty and Manifest Genius, straight from the brow of Chula Vista's blown-dry Rimbaud. Patti accepted my tribute, blankly, and made her way back to the stage.

I waited for weeks that lengthened into months for the response I was convinced would come, an invitation---written in Patti's sprawling hand, on Radio Ethiopia stationery---to join the other pomaded loveboys in her East Village seraglio, there to languish in an opium-eaters' haze, like the dissolute bohemians in Nicholas Roeg's Performance, to sleep, perchance to dream, maybe even to star in the remake of Robert Having His Nipple Pierced as an after-school special. Crushingly, it never came, leaving me marooned in the cultural wastelands of '70s San Diego, where mullets ruled and ZZ Top's "Le Grange" jockeyed with Loggins & Messina's "Vahevala" for FM-radio supremacy.

Years later, after I'd moved to NYC and passed through an ill-advised but mercifully brief-lived phase as a Jim Carroll impersonator on New York's Lower East Side performance-poetry circuit, Jim and I would meet again, over margaritas, to speak of the Gnostic gospels and Catholicism and Bukowski and Catholicism and Hassan I Sabbah, founder of the cult of the assassins, and Catholicism, and Michael Jackson, unbelievably enough, and watching a cat eat a bird at the legendary Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles. And Catholicism. Speaking of which, how is punk rock like the Stations of the Cross? Answer: "I said it on the Tom Snyder show when my first album came out, that punk rock is just like the Stations of the Cross. What could be more punk than this guy getting a crown of thorns, being scourged, carrying a cross up a mountain and being crucified?"

Read "Words I Want Carved on My Tomb: Jim Carroll, R.I.P.," my meditation on Carroll's passing here, at Mother Jones magazine.

Read my 1984 interview with Carroll here.

The Speedy Gonzales of Zoot-Suit Derrideanism

William Anthony Nericcio, Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the "Mexican" in America (University of Texas Press, 2006) .

The irony of William Nericcio's psychoanalysis (schizoanalysis?) of apparitions of The Mexican in the dream life of American culture is that Nericcio himself embodies---even as he appropriates and subverts---the stereotype of the Spanglish-speekeeng Trickster figure, tunneling under the heavily fortified borders between discursive zones. He's the Speedy Gonzales of zoot-suit Derrideanism. Better yet, he's the Mil Mascaras of critical theory, a masked semiotic wrestler pummeling multiple meanings out of the flotsam tossed up by our disposable culture.

Drawing on post-colonial theory, Chicano/a studies, a deep knowledge of American history, a scary mastery of continental theory, and an undisguised delight in the retinal pleasures and greasy seductions of junk culture, Nericcio spins us around to face our image of The Mexican, and in so doing reveals it for the cultural mirror it really is, a funhouse reflection of Anglo America's anxieties and fantasies about the Other. Ask not for whom the Taco Bell tolls, Lou Dobbs; it tolls for ustedes.

Text{e}-Mex crackles with a manic energy and an antic wit that are rare in academic writing, most of which tends toward soul-crushing ponderousness. Like the French philosophers who've clearly influenced his work, Nericcio tosses off oracular pronouncements without op. cits or apology and rejoices in wordplay. At the same time, his willingness to open the throttle on the passions that animate his arguments and take his rhetoric to telenovela heights of soap-operatic excess, pushing the envelope of his tropes and intertextual riffs into the ultra baroque, seems (to this gabacho, at least) profoundly Mexican. Here he is decrypting a "startling gringo artifact"---packaging for a toy called the Sparkling Clay Factory, featuring a hysterically Anglo boy and girl: "Check out these cute gringo kids from my private collection of 'ethnic' types (in particular, look closely at the boy on the right, who has been digitally processed so much that his 'skin' takes on the texture of a Pixar-born(e) computer-generated-image offspring of a CGI wet dream by the in vitro-cloned hybrid child of Mengele, Geppetto, and John Lasseter)." He deadpans, "I am still trying to figure out what planet the depicted organisms on this torn box cover come from."

If you're the sort of intellectual border-jumper who thinks Zizek would make the perfect guest host for Gustavo Arellano's "!Ask a Mexican" newspaper column; if you fantasize about staging Foucault's essay "The Masked Philosopher" as an off-broadway production starring lucha libre stars; if the next two items in your Netflix queue are Derrida and Wrestling Women versus the Aztec Mummy, Text{e}-Mex is your answered prayer.

But don't say I didn't warn you: Early on, Nericcio warns us that he's an unreliable tour guide---("ok, remember that your author is a recovering Catholic Tejano---idealism and the apocalypse lurk around every paragraph")---and, like all the best intellects who run through the world like a Tijuana switchblade, he goes meta, stepping outside his own analytical paradigm to interrogate that, as well. "The germ of this book was a vendetta I had for an animated Mexican mouse by the name of Speedy Gonzales; but, in the end, I had to let the anger go," he writes, in the book's introductory chapter." Tellingly, he quotes Baudrillard, the always ironic John the Baptist in our Desert of the Real: "Baudrillard...says: `It is always a false problem to want to restore the truth beneath the simulacrum.' Look behind Speedy or beneath Freddy Lopez and one will not find Mexican-hating illustrators or Latino-loathing puppeteers...More often than not, one will find someone working sine dolo malo, "without fault, without an intent of evil...'" Text{e}-Mex is a cross between the red pill that gives Neo an ontological migraine in The Matrix and the worm at the bottom of the mezcal bottle. Nericcio shows you just how deep the bottle goes.

Fava Beans and a Big Amarone Fine Chianti

Head by Gaetano Zumbo, La Specola museum, Florence, Italy. Postcard.

My two-week stint as Boing Boing guestblogger ended Monday. Exhilarating, exhausting, ex...machina? Archives here, and here, and here, and here , here, for anyone interested.

Reliquary of San Valentino, Basilica di Santa Maria in Cosmedin, Rome, Italy. Postcard.

I'm still picking the shrapnel out of my Kevlar backside. A rite of passage, to be sure. Anonymous posting seems to enable the most troll-tastic troglodytism or, worse yet, a Nitpicking Unto Death. But BB's hive mind is supersmart, so when the critiques were constructive, they were invaluable. I was mightily impressed by some posters' intellectual generosity of spirit, their willingness to share their wisdom and thoughtfully challenge my arguments. And the editors---especially the long-suffering David Pescovitz, who shoveled my screeds onto the site because Boing Boing's back end makes piloting an F-15 blindfolded look like a cakewalk---were marvelous.

Architectural detail, St. Peter's Basilica, Rome, Italy. Author photo.

As I wrote in my sign-off post (groaningly titled "Post Mortem"---sorry!), I had much, much more to say when the sands in the hourglass ran out:

If I'd had time, I would have walked you through the Museum of Pathological Anatomy in Florence and the taxidermic Eden of the Museum of Zoology in Bologna, its wall-eyed creatures leaking stuffing, unloved by anyone except the occasional devotee of what the postmodern theorist Steve Baker calls "botched taxidermy." Did I mention the bizarre, Ed Gein-ian anatomical preparations of the 18th century naturalist Girolamo Segato, in the anatomy museum at the Ospedale Carregi in Florence? (A "maker" after Boing Boing's heart, he crafted a handsome table, inset with what looked like polished stones but were, in fact, human organs, preserved, cut into geometric shapes, and fitted into a colorful mosaic. When Segato proudly presented a local noble with the results of his handiwork, the squicked-out noble declined.) And then there's the incomparable museum of teratology and pathology, just a building away in the same hospital, with its mind-altering waxes of skin diseases and its wet specimens of congenital deformities, a Boschian garden of unearthly (yet all too human) things, unforgettable, almost indescribable. And then there's the Museum of Veterinary Pathology and the Ercole Lelli waxes in the Palazzo Poggi, both in Bologna, and...and...

Happily, as I also noted in my last hurrah, I'll be taking up those very subjects here, whenever I can tear myself away from the writing desk.

The silverware glints, your place awaits, and the waiter is un-dish-covering the dish. But remember: It isn't etiquette to cut any one you've been introduced to.