Amuseuments

Here I am in the Musee D'Orsay. Exceedingly cool place. Here's a link to my review:

Paris: Day Two: -- The Marais Month of May

Michael Osman shows us the prison where they held Marie Antoinette and friends, including Princess Maria Teresa of Savoy. According to urban legend, the jailers told Princess Maria, "You're free to go." After she hit the street, the mob ripped her to pieces. Then they paraded her head (and maybe other bits) in front of Marie Antoinette's window.

We check out the Rue des Rosiers and Place de la Bastille

We hit a swell-looking square called Place des Vosges. (Actually more of a rectangle, but I won't quibble.)  King Henri IV laid it out and surrounded it with upscale townhouses. (Fake brickwork. Reminds me of Sarasota.)

Fun historical tidbit: King Henri IV is the French king who said "Be nice to Protestants, iot's the law": in the Edict of Nantes. In contrast to the sumbitch "Sun King" Louis XIV, who revoked the edict in 1749. (Which led to open season on Protestants. The usual stakebuirnings you'd expect. The French nobility also sewed up protestants in giant bird suits and hunted them for sport, as seen in Ken Russell's "The Devils.") Not my favorite French king. but King Henri IV is all right.

Michael's impressed I know this stuff.

He shows us the digs where Cardinal Richelieu and Victor Hugo used to live. Chez Hugo is a museum now. They've fixed it up, but they had to wait. An old lady occupied much of the ground floor for years until she died. Squatters rights and all that. Welcome to France.  

He shows us fragments of Paris' old city wall, Says the Scumking's hangers on left town and hung out at Versailles, and pretty much left their upscale houses to rot. Years of neglect, most got bulldozed in recent urban renewal, a few spiffed up. Fragments of Marais' Jewish heritage, too. Faded Hebrew lettering. A temple the Nazis gutted, now restored. Mementos of the Chez Jo Goldenberg restaurant bombing -- a plaque and a pock-marked wall. We walk by the Shoah museum, but don't go in. Here's what we didn't see.

Yep, it looks exactly like that. A wall of names, a moving place. The simplicity of a stone on a grave. So I'm told.

A few rabbis stroll by, the temple is back in biz and there's a deli here and there. But it's mostly fallafel shops and e-cigarettes. Gentrification accomplished what the Nazis and Abu Nidal couldn't.

As a matter of fact, you do have to live like a refugee.

Paris: Day One

Arrive at Charles de Gaulle Airport. Like its namesake, the place is imposing, loud, and really makes no sense. Long, snaking lines of more ethnic groups than a 1980s Benetton ad. Su and I stand in one for a thousand years. Finally emerge from customs/baggage rigamarole into the actual terminal. Now, how do we get out of this glass cage? Look around, no exit. Keep looking, still no exit. Agggh! We're trapped in a giant glass homage to Sartre! Wait ...there it is!

The door out. The beautfiul glorious door out. 

So we're out. We find a taxi ... or a taxi finds us. Algerian taxi driver drives us to city. (The dude specifically said, "Je ne suis pas Francais," or I wouldn't mention it.) Excellent driver, going with the traffic's lunatic start-stop, switchback flow. Maintains a constant, high-speed rant the whole time.  France hassles Muslims; kids these days don't know how to work; he works five jobs. Something like that. I understand maybe one out of every ten words, but smile and nod like a bobblehead doll. Su does the same and occasionally comments. She grasps one in five words. 

And the road leads ever on.

Streets narrow, traffic slows. Le Interstate segues to the outer rings of Paris. Driverdirects our attention to one of many security cams. Says something to the effect, "Before the attack, the French hated CCTV. They believed in liberity, equality, Fraternity, hmm? But cameras are OK, now. Soldiers too. it's security, equality fraternity today." Good one.

Speaking of les soldats, we roll past a few. They're wearing camo and berets and carrying bigass automatic weapons straight out of Duke Nukem. Is this normal? Charlie Hebdo, says the driver. Ah.

He lets us out, does the things with the bags, drives off. We made it. 

Welcome to Paris. Watch your ass.

Yep, here we are in Le Marais, Paris' formerly Jewish quarter, now its mostly gay and/or hipster quarter. (Think street art, cobblestone streets, quaint buildings, hip tourists, and commerce.) A smiling, bearded, bright-eyed dude meets us, leads us to our Air BnB dwelling. As advertised, said flat is a bright, two-story cave in a building from the 1700s. Strictly speaking, he's not supposed to be renting it out. IF anybody asks, we're visiting cousins of a woman named ... uh. Marie Le Fakename. Something like that.

After squaring stuff away, we head back out. There's a soldier with an automatic weapon right in front of our door. I feel more secure already.

More streets. More soliders. Welcome to Alphaville, my friend.

Lots of the art on the walls, too. Graffiti. Subversions of signage. A sad-eyed lady, bleeding from the eye -- a repeated icon in massive posters signed Konny. Other weird stuff.

My art musings go in another blog -- one they actually pay me for. Might get irritating if I keep yammering about paintings. So as not to break the flow, I'll drop in links to my mirror site. Like so:

Marais: Street Art

Eyes full of art, Su and I stroll Seinewards, cross a bridge, make a pilgrimage to Shakespeare & Co. Su sits at an old mechanical typewriter and looks cute. I snap her pic with my iPhone. She gets up to browse. I sit down. Was planning to type ...

"time travel" what a ridiculous notion. The fine folks at "Temporal Excursions" took my money and supposedly sent me ahead to Shakespeare and Company in 2016. As predicted I blacked out, woke up. Now here I am ... at said bookshop. Don't buy it. I wasn't, if you'll pardon the expression, born yesterday. Don't know how they did it, but this is clearly a fake and this is obviously not Shakespeare & Co, obviously not Paris, and obviously not 2016. Where when what the hell it is I can't tell you. Hallucination? Thought scares the crap out of me. Wherever this is or isn't, I want to get out. It's all so damn dirty and ugly and the people dress like clowns or overgrown children. Fat old men in shorts with lots of pockets, and wearing these idiotic hats ... it's hard to describe. The future can't be this ...

Clever huh?

Yeah, but it remains a conceptual concept, not something somebody might read on that old Olympia thinking, gosh maybe a time traveler wrote this stuff. Not going to happen. It's a non-typing typewriter. There's paper, but no damn ribbon.

Almost bought an old issue of Evergreen. Didn't.

This one.

Homeways is bestways. We reverse direction., walk along the Seine. We pass by stand after stand of calendars, Eiffel Tower models. Looks like Banksy left his mark on the wall on the other side.

Another bridge. Our returning path intersects L'Isle de Citie. We see Notre Dame cathedral, no hunchback.

Back where we started, in good old Marais. Graffito on the walls, that woman's face again. Sad blonde with bleeding eye. OR many iterations of the eye-bleeding blonde. And ...

Walking the shop-me streets of Marais, just a croissant's throw from our Air B&B flat, we run into Jacques Halbert -- a French expat artist who lived in Sarasota years back. Fun guy, painter a Fluxus inspired cherry-painting Daddy who thumbs his nose at all things, as we used to say, square. Back when Su and I put out an art rag, we interviewed him, put his art on the cover a few times. Now he's here in the flesh. And he's gob-smacked. Can't believe he's looking at us ...

Shit! Su? Marty? Oh my God! What are you doing here? I can't believe it! Or words to the effect.

As the three of us stand there contemplating the sheer metaphysical, epistemological ontological improbability of it all, a blonde haired woman saunters up, thin, early 40s. Turns out she's the artist behind all those icons of the eye-bleeding blonde. (Self portrait maybe?) Jacques can't believe it.  Shit! Konny? Oh my God, this is too much! What the hell are you doing here? This is fucking impossible! Straining probability to the breaking point, it turns out she knows Jacques and Jacques knows her, yep, they're great friends. Her name is Konny Steding, she's visiting from Germany. Now, on this fine sunny day, we all bump into each other on this one little spot in one little street in Marais in the enormous seething hive of humanity that is 20th century PAris. What are the odds?

Having concluded our philosophical ruminations, the four of us cross the street our apartment. We stay maybe five minutes, then head back out to the pizza joint on the other side. Drink, eat, talk. Drink, eat, talk. Then return to the flat. Repeat the process.

A good time was had by all.

First impressions.
France resembles a dirtier, less efficient, more ethnically diverse version of Switzerland.

Open Secret

Creativity is anarchic. You might work for somebody. That creative imp inside your brain doesn't. He's interested in what he's interested in, period. He doesn't care about money, fame, fortune, status, prestige, or the rent check that's due at the end of the month.

To get the imp to work, you either have to ...

Luck out with an assignment that actually interests the Imp.

Trick the Imp into being interested.

Torture the Imp until he comes up with something.

Turn in pure hack work.

Anarchy, it should be noted, isn't chaos.

It's a form of self-emerging order.

Review: House of Cards

Netflix' House of Cards is an American remake of a UK miniseries. But it's really a 21st century rip-off of Richard III. Clever idea, but they get it wrong. There's more to Shakespeare than cynicism and soliloquies.

Richard III only won for a short time, then God handed him his hunchback ass and sent him looking for a horse. Frank Underwood keeps winning and its damned depressing. He wins the White House, gets away with murder, gets plugged in the liver and bounces back like a Satanic Energizer Bunny Rabbit. The show's title is House of Cards, of course. This implies a reckoning and a fall. At this point, it'd be like hearing Hitler died in a nursing home in Argentina.

Richard III was a sociopathic creep, but the man was fun at parties. Hell, he enjoyed being evil. He grooved on it. His approach to the audience was, "Watch this, kids! I just killed that sobbing lady's husband -- now watch me take her to bed!" Alex of A Clockwork Orange is an obvious descendant. But Frank doesn't have that kind of fun. Yeah, he gets his one-liners and snarky asides. But he's wounded, brooding and bitter. And no damn fun at parties.

It strikes me that Shakespeare was gob-smacked at the idea that evil people could lie to your face. Their immense powers of bullshit put normal, non-evil people at a temporary disadvantage. It's not that good people were stupid and evil bastards were smart -- it simply never occurred to all the unsuspecting nice folks that Richard III, Macbeth, Iago and other lying bastards could lay waste to their lives with a smile. Once the good people figured it out, they quickly made up for lost time in the head-chopping and stabbing department. But the good people in House of Cards are idiots. Frank Underwood plays chess and they play checkers.

Richard III was not a brilliant strategist. The man had one move -- the sucker punch. But that never works for long. All the suckers quickly wind up on the floor or learn to keep their guard up -- suckers no more. Richard III framed his main political threat as a traitor and had his goons slice, dice and drown all the rival claimants to the throne. Once he wins the crown, he's kind of like the dog who finally catches the car -- now what does he do? He breaks his promises, commits fresh atrocities, pisses off his former allies, pisses everybody off. He doesn't know when to stop -- so the entire pissed-off nation of England gets together and stops him. Frank Underwood, on the other hand, is a Machiavellian mastermind with millions of kick-ass moves. Nobody stands a chance. He wins, they lose. After awhile, it just gets boring.

So, Iet's say the creators had followed Shakespeare's recipe. It'd've been a more interesting show -- that would have ended after one or two seasons. Franks doom would come soon. Maybe a blood bath culminating in a military junta and death squads. Or a metastisizing scandal leading to Impeachment, resignation, prison, distrace and the loss of future speaking engagements.

What we have instead is a smart show that wrote itself into a corner. Too bad. The Bard isn't around for script doctoring. And I'm fresh out of ideas.

Infinite Jest

Infinite Jest. Finally tackled it, folks. David Foster Wallace's magnum opiates, that is. Here, at last, is my book review. 20 years late and a dollar short. First impressions?

Well, at 1,079 pages, it lives up to its name. Sizewise, this is a bigass novel -- a shaggy dog story on a Gravity's Rainbow scale. Not infinite, by any means. It just feels that way. So what's the story?

Tough question, actually.

Wallace's approach to plot makes Quentin Tarantino look like an obsessive compulsive who folds his towels in the same order. Which is to say the plot is all over the place. Non-linear, cut-up, sliced, diced, folded and fragmented.

If you ironed it out, Infinite Jest is a science fiction novel ... sort of. The SF narrative unfolds something like this:

Back in 1996, Wallace dreamed of a new bad future in the not-too-distant years following Y2K. The year is probably 2010 thereabouts, but he never nails it down. Time is subsidized by various corporations, so it's the year of the Tucks Medicated Pads, etc.

America, Mexico and Canada have now consolidated into one bigass country: the Organization of North American Nations. (ONAN, get it?) The real estate formerly known as New England is now a vast toxic waste dump called The Great Concavity. (The waste is fired into this stinking expanse via high-tech catapults.) Herds of feral hamsters roam this vast wasteland.

The computer, TV and telephone have merged into a cartridge-based technology.

Filmmaker James Orin Incandenza (aka "Himself," aka "JOI") has created an impressively twisted oeuvre in this medium. He ends his filmography with a killer entertainment. As in, duh, literally. His cartridge (aka the "samizdat" aka "Infinite Jest") is so addictive, those who see it lose all desire to do anything else but see it again and again and ...

... keep watching the damn thing until they die.

Why kill your audience? JOI's motives are unclear and he's not around to ask. After finishing the samizdat, the filmmaker offs himself by sticking his head in a modified microwave oven.

But the master cartridge is out there somewhere.

Some pissed-off Quebec revolutionaries in wheelchairs want to find it, bien sur. They plan to unleash this media mindbomb on an unsuspecting American populace in their desire to secede from that whole ONAN deal.

In an echo of Hamlet dealing with his father's ghost, James Incandenza's son -- the tennis prodigy, Hal -- gets sucked into the plot. It's possible there's an antidote cartridge. Hal might possibly find it and stop the damn thing. It's equally possible that the Québécois separatists will fry America's collective noodle if they find the master cartridge first and make a shitload of duplicates. (Both cartridges are lodged in Himself's exploded and buried head ... possibly.) It's highly probable the rolling revolutionaries dosed Hal's noodle with a psychotomimetic mold to knock him out of the game. Either that, or a tennis rival put it on Hal's toothpaste. Possibly. Either way, the clock is ticking, eh?

That reads like the plot of a jokey science fiction novel -- something by Kurt Vonnegut or Neal Stephenson, perhaps. (Attentive readers will note the similarity to the mental virus of Stephenson's Snow Crash.) That's a novel I'd like to read, kids. But it's not the novel Wallace wanted to write.

The SF story I just summarized only pops up in bits and fragments. Wallace has fun with it -- but it's not what really interests him. But he's downright obsessed with tennis and addiction. So, my hunch is ...

The SF stuff is a loss-leader to get you to read the two novels he wanted to write about his twin obsessions. Said novels-within-the-novel offer fictionalized versions of two, involuted, convoluted, self-contained subcultures of which Wallace had personal experience:

An academy for young tennis phenoms: Enfield Tennis Academy ("ETA").

A drug rehabilitation clinic: Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House.

Not to dance around the point here: Wallace was a former tennis prodigy and a recovering drug addict. At least until he killed himself. 

Wallace populates his two subcultures with "a host of interesting characters," as a hack writer might say. He describes their lives with granular detail. Hal helps his father take apart a bed to get rid of a creaking noise? That's 20 pages or so. The Enfield kids play a war game simulating nuclear holocaust with tennis balls? 50 pages. And what thick pages they are. Wallace maintains a consistently maddening, high-res, OCD level of specificity throughout the book. But sometimes even that's just not enough -- Wallace famously peppers his book with "end notes," sometimes explaining shit, sometimes saying "no clue." 

Elmore Leonard he ain't. Though compared to Finnegans Wake, it's a light read. Compared to Gravity's Rainbow -- ah, skip it. I'll cut to the chase.

In summary: The bulk of the book is comprised of two cut-up novels about drug addicts and tennis brats. Wallace intertwines these narratives with a loose SF thread. Snip that thread out, and you're left with two realistic, if fragmented, narratives that could happen in the present day. Realistic. But not an easy read.

Wallace's prose style mixes obscure words that'd cross Anthony Burgess' eyeballs with a loopy conversational style imitating casual Gen X speech patterns. We're talking, like, redundancies, digressions, you know, like the stuff you say when you're talking and saying stuff you don't, like, edit. That there's what they call "authorial intention." Wallace's letter to his publishers threatened dire retribution if they tried to clean up his prose.

If you've got the fortitude for this variety of fictional long distance running, his shaggy dog stories are exceedingly funny. Though the payoff can be a long time coming. (Drum roll please.) And the punchline is ...

Addiction.

Addiction? Seriously?

Seriously.

It sounds so lame.

It's the heart of the book.

Infinite Jest wins the 1996 Stephen King award for most directly stated or implied anti-drug references per page. These include an addict who walked around with her dead baby until it rotted and fused to her flesh. Just say no, kids.

The addicts have their Substances. But the tennis brats are equally addicted to competition and performance. And their own Substances. All God's children are hooked on something.

And let's not forget the book's central image ...

A lab rat with a lever wired up to its brain's pleasure centers. A rat who stops eating, drinking and sleeping and keeps pressing the lever until it dies. Which is pretty much what happens to unlucky humans who see the Entertainment.

Neil Postman said we're amusing ourselves to death. Wallace took the notion literally.

This mountain of a book is the result.

R.I.P. Paul Kantner

Paul Kantner

March 17, 1941 – January 28, 2016

But I wonder will the sun still see all the people goin' by

Will the moon still hang in the sky

When I die?

—from Paul Kantner's "The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil"