Self Tapes

Lolita, Keats, Basho, Brer Rabbit and I enter a bar to discuss the Epstein Files but the Super Bowl is playing and we discuss that instead.

Setting: A winter Sunday in Los Angeles where it’s 80 degrees and the Super Bowl is encroaching like the last paid soldier. The hour of the fallen star.

—

My sudden urge to read Nabokov is either coincidental or a subtle, slow-tilting trauma response to the files, though I don’t feel myself imploding under the weight of the new data, full of to me redundant revelations about the deviants and cannibals who have installed the New World Order that is now wavering, if not toppling, if not being topped off by your newfound awareness of their sins, sins which they consider miracles and favors they perform in exchange for their performance of power and your compliance. The performance is incoherent enough to seem spectacular, it scrambles the senses and trains them to grope for a center and call that reaching its rigor. They consider a culling of all who will not agree and be quiet, and be impressed, and be pacified, and be worked, and danced on the decks of ships and stored in the holds like cattle for slow kill. Half in love with easeful death, I doubt they mind the threat of guillotine or disappearing that could come of their being found out, but being the easefully walking dead we dare not inflict a punishment so severe it would rob us of our access to jesters and the evil joust they carry like pop singers on tour forever.

And how would Proust feel (narrow road to the interior)¹

And Faustian delusion in nihilism’s fields, lavender fields

Kim Fields’ sister, a child star on Nickelodeon’s The Secret World of Alex Mack and also my nervous-eyed school mate. The smile in her gaze turned to sandstone and vigil after the show. Far cry from the Robert Frost auditorium where our assemblies were held and school plays like Our Town performed, to the set of real television, but not very far after all in the tradition of exclaiming: I just do not know, where there is to get to. Basho keeps walking through seventeenth century Japan, I’ll keep walking too, reciting Prince’s “Seventeen Days” and thinking of the magazine that taught me how to pray for thigh gaps and doll’s eyes until they came naturally like a shadow in the mirror.

What deflection works best on men who center girlchildren as their preeminent love interests while positioning themselves in direct opposition to girlhood, cannibalizing the girls who might impede this aim by respecting ourselves too much.

No, literally, eating the children and calling them jerky while they play dead or play follow-the-leader and you’re in the game too, an initiate by dissociation refusing to imagine where else there is to get to in consciousness and therefore in form.

More restless than distressed, I can’t decide between finishing Prince’s autobiography, The Beautiful Ones, plucked form Kahlil’s library like a flower from a veiled garden, reading some Alice Notley poems, watching Being John Malkovich, or rereading Lolita, a book that almost convinces the reader that the deranged man, for being so orderly and intentional in his derangements, is the tender heroic man, the one who saves the girl he ruins. What if obsession is salvation for men who love girlchildren, we’re asked, in an unironic Russian accent, what if it sends them into limber, lifelong rituals that inflect their time with more meaning than ours? Should you envy them, should you be more like them, should you beg for an invitation to their island like Elon did in the documents? Should their terribleness be a minor digression between albums?

And here comes Bad Bunny, Bugs Bunny, the flags, the cane fields shrugging and shredded into asses or assets that wag better than fingers, and together we are convinced that “The Americas” have enacted a purposeful and symbolic realignment through twelve minutes of almost sublime party music, pardon music. If you need culture to be redeemed or called redeeming out of habit or sweet cowardice claiming civility, don’t come around here. Here, what’s barren is called barren, even if the whole world is watching in anticipation of praise songs and apologia and it’s also legendary and unprecedented and good for business and very convincing and well-choreographed and I was dancing along myself as if making a self tape for an audition, as if pleading— cast me as girl 7 with ass in air for the next act.

In light of what many are discovering for the first time about how the world functions and malfunctions from behind and ahead and beyond them, I’m discovering something too. I’m blue about it in a so what or I really don’t care do you way. But I should care, and I do. In an adieu, let’s go away from here, way. I wake up every day and load my wagon with the will to resist it even as I succumb. I walk so many steep miles, stretch, dance, read, huddle, light the stationary torches each evening and pray over microgreens and berries and these letters, until I’m my own Lolita variation, my own impossibly aloof muse, exuberant but never satisfied. A good friend calls himself a brat tamer while over to help me install a shower filter that will make my hair and skin so soft and luminous. I wince internally like a struck animal, like a tamed creature turning against her false self, and I think him and his spastic puppy, for their service, their camaraderie, this softness of stands and stranded intensity.

One dilemma of the fall of North America is that we seem to have survived it or braced ourselves against it by carrying the weight of the debris as our beauty and favorite music. We’ve become one with its tragic flaws. We have been successfully harvested, reaped, in exchange for how flattering it is to be up for the role of girl 7 in the imaginary musical version of happily every after in oblivion. I watched the light in her eyes turn mercenary, off or on depending on the cameras and call times. Some of my favorite men watch football casually but religiously. A buzz kill or untamed brat, I blame them as much as I do myself, for lacking the restraint it would take to make a new culture, one that doesn’t glorify the worst things about itself and demand art and music that accommodate that gaming. We fall in line too easily, worse than falling in love too easily, eagerly discussing the clever intricacies of the halftime show as though they absolve the past and present siege. As though it’s pleasure to be the intended audience for these long commercials for the reordering of the world order. As though lighthearted despair is the unifying pleasure for girl 7, ass in the air as the crowd cheers.

George Clinton made the one true song, “America Eats its Young,” sampled by J Dilla on his deathbed, and reenacted here. One day, when it’s no use, we’ll reject these carefully curated distractions from ourselves. In anticipation of that coming indifference, they get slicker, more intoxicating, more like mergers of house and field, radical pacifist gentry nonbinary elite fictions of the unassailable hope machine.

I decided to listen to the rest of the Prince story as read by my friend esperanza, while walking on my walking pad and texting myself the lines of poems that only arrive when the body is moving and listening. He performed at the Super Bowl too. Now he’s dead and his flesh is fed to me in small respectable portions of impossible nostalgia. The book is unfinished, a literary haunted house. Even when he arrives at his adult years, he hasn’t recovered from his childhood. And you get the sense that he’s more estranged than dead, banished to another dimension where he’s leading a better life, that he figured out where to get to and is just about to tell you when it all collapses into school pictures and set lists.

1.

To The Deep North

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