#274: Games, and Why We Play Them

MSJ made the greatest JFK series of all time. It’s been an endless ride through Dallas ever since!

It’s art because the story is told backwards 🤓

I haven't gone into much depth, largely because that "depth" "exists" in the work of dumb self-promoting liars, but Polanski was pretty clearly into a fucking grim porn underground, most-to-all of which (as presently known) seems to have involved some form of rape, particularly people raping Sharon Tate. He's way scarier, like way scarier, than "a movie director who drugged and molested a 13-year-old girl," which is fucking bad enough. (You ever notice how rarely anyone ends that description with "... at Jack Nicholson's house"?) It's cheap psychoanalysis, but I can't help imagining that someone who got through the Holocaust by pretending to be other people, some real, some not, would have a sharply magnified sense of what you can "achieve" by simply insisting, with a straight face, that something false is true, and something true is false. I mean he was best friends with Jerzy Kosínski, for fuck's sake, and the main reason nobody reads Kosínski now is that his Holocaust "memoir" THE PAINTED BIRD was either made up or taken from other people's lives, Kosínski himself didn't even write the whole thing, and at the time of its publication, he could barely speak English. The book is written in English. Over decades, it emerged that he had also lied about a thousand other things, including having "written" things that other people said or wrote to him, and the fact that his flamboyant bon vivant lifestyle may have been the product of CIA employment as a professional Polish anticommunist. Kosínski eventually responded by killing himself. Roman Polanski, a major notch above/below ol' Jerzy, is not gonna kill himself.

His fiction always struck me as depressingly desperate to shock, but I remember some of his nonfiction being very good – THE ACCURSED SHARE, just the whole notion, and I am one of 9 people in history who's actually read EROTISM. I did it entirely while very, very drunk, so I don't remember much except that I thought it was good. There's a section in there which I considered adjoining to Adorno/Horkheimer here, and I still might, if I can find it; basically it's about the notion of sacrificial killing, the way the Enlightened West considers it "barbaric" and "beyond reason," when 1) we're still doing that shit, and 2) it was precisely NOT unreasoning for the cultures who practiced it. It was, within their cosmology, the eminently rational act of appeasing a god or force with the power to tear the world apart – in modern parlance, an act designed for the maintenance of social cohesion, in which the chaos "outside society" is focused upon and channeled into a creature you can actually kill. (In some societies, like pre-Columbian Mesoamerican ones, the sacrificial victim was notified far in advance, sometimes a year in advance, that he or she was going to die; it was considered a position of the greatest nobility and valor, because the victim would be dying to save everyone else; and between the victim's selection and his/her actual death, he/she often lived like royalty. You kill somebody to make the world hold together, and you honor that person in advance with your idea of a good afterlife, which is both enjoyable in itself and a constant reminder that the victim wasn't dying for nothing, he/she was dying precisely on behalf of the civilization capable of furnishing his/her present comfort and splendor. If nobody dies for the sake of maintaining a society, EVERYBODY dies, in much worse ways, when that society collapses.) It's orderly, regular murder in the name of preventing chaotic, unpredictable murder, and if you (the generaly "you") don't believe the USA has been engaged in that exact practice for 250 consecutive years – and doing it at a level the Aztecs would consider embarrassingly amateurish – I don't know what to tell you

I actually think people should read a Houellebecq novel or two, just as a sort of psychic rectal thermometer for the West in the ’90s and early 2000s. He's a very rare (not always "good") kind of artist, the kind who's able to cut deep into End of History awfulness and document its geological strata, NOT because he's talented or smart or immune to period bigotries, but because he's a piece of shit in exactly the same way as the pieces of shit he writes about. Usually a vicious stupid person is too dumb for any comprehension of how and why he's vicious and stupid, but somehow Houellebecq does, I imagine partly because he DOES really hate post-Soviet global capitalism (but he'd make every possible effort to replace it with something worse), and partly because he is genuinely without shame. Which brings us back to Philippe Sollers: "That's great! Most French writers only PRETEND they can't feel shame."

If you're talking about the audio, good ears. I'm fuckin' done with the fuckin' Teletronix LA-2A plugin last in the chain unless I'm making fake British TV from the ’60s. Pushes terrible bass and mid-lows in the human voice

Not like full suit-of-armor shit, but there were still horseback guys wearing breastplates and little shoulder-chest pieces on their dominant arms and such. And there were thick leather versions of things like greaves, or some kind of fabric patterned in a way that would slow down the distribution of incoming force (that puffy diamond-weave you still see on kevlar vests sometimes) with 4 inches of padding behind it

Shout out to Business Gay Mindset! and Brother Judge

In English, William Burroughs and J.G. Ballard, especially Ballard from ATROCITY EXHIBITION up to HIGH-RISE. Nobody who speaks English has read any Burroughs after NAKED LUNCH or any Ballard except the early sci-fi or the novels from CRASH onward, and you will not fucking believe what's on every page of THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION. In French, probably the early work of Pierre Guyotat, EDEN EDEN EDEN and TOMB FOR 500,000 SOLDIERS ... but I'm pretty sure Guyotat signed the 1977 Matzneff letter, and both of those books concern at least a fictionalized version of the two years he really spent as a French soldier in Algeria, 1960-62, trying to put down the War of Independence. If you read them, even without knowing that, you'll be hard-pressed to avoid a creeping suspicion of how Guyotat knew what we knew

I need to get on that after i finish 2666

there's a really good, well considered breakdown of the album Bish Bosch that Hesse Deni (movie mindset) did with Evan Laffer (jokermen podcast) ... they did it as a one-off somewhere on the jokermen feed, iirc ... i thought it was excellent and it wouldn't be the worst place to start imo

He's hard to talk about, because he's one of the very few great musicians who started with words and then "scored" them, rather than writing songs as such, so it's kind of all there in the lyrics – except the question of WHAT is all there, which can take years to begin figuring out, and there are plenty of cases in which I still don't know. I'll give you a good one, though: "Clara" on THE DRIFT is about Clara Petacci, Mussolini's mistress, right? "Sleepwalker's Woman," CLIMATE OF HUNTER. Adolf Hitler, after successfully remilitarizing the Rheinland in 1936: "I go the way that Providence dictates with the assurance of a sleepwalker." He was sometimes referred to by Nazis, in a complimentary sense, as The Sleepwalker, the man who cannot explain or even predict himself but who acts with an unerring grasp of Destiny. "Sleepwalker's Woman" is about Eva Braun, and I think particularly Eva Braun in the Führerbunker at the end, because "As if all that replaced us / Ends it again / As if all that replaced us / Ends" is not only a Fourth Reich manifesto, or a declaration that this end is THE end, that this is Götterdämmerung, and whatever follows can live only in the wasteland of pseudo-history, in which Heaven and the Gods have already been destroyed – I believe it also refers to what Hitler said, according to his valet Heinz Linge, right before killing himself: "For the sake of The One who is still to come."