Metal City - Hai Ina Ia Mai Ana Ka Puana

Before I go to bed.

The delectable sarni from the momentous Infernality sent me a little quiz to do tonight. A 'meme', they're called. I thought I'd fill it out and post the results.

Oh, and painting went fine. Davena is the greatest. And her partner is about as fine a man as one could imagine. He even understands the damaging effects that too much exposure to Crowded House can have on a young man's heterosexuality. Now, that's what I call wisdom.

1. You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451. Which book do you want to be?

Norman Mailer's 'Advertisements For Myself'. Mailer is an out-of-control egomaniac, and a dose of his mammoth self-confidence would probably do me some good.

2. Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Well, I was going to say that I kinda had a thing for the girl in the bear suit from John Irving's 'The Hotel New Hampshire", but Kathryn will laugh at me. So, instead, I'll go with Ali Tanner from Robert Ludlum's 'The Osterman Weekend'. I'm not gonna say why, though - but it has something to do with a girl, a crossbow, and a job she's just gotta do.

3. The last book you bought was...?

Ordeal by Linda Lovelace. It's out of print, so I had to hit Ebay. Linda, crazed with paranoid thoughts implanted in her admittedly weak mind by Gloria Steinem and Susan Brownmiller, unleashes a dizzying collection of reminisces that veer between fact, half-truths, and flat-out bullshit. The question is - what really happened? Was she forced into performing in 'Deep Throat'? Did Chuck Traynor use hypnosis to encourage her remarkable oral sex technique? Does Hugh Hefner REALLY have the world's largest collection of 8mm animal pornography?

I guess we'll never know.

4. The last book you read was...?

Well, the aforementioned Ordeal. Failing that, the ever-cheery Killing For Culture - An Illustrated History Of The Death Film From Mondo To Snuff. This is a really fantastic textbook that looks at the history of real death on film from the early 20th century, through to the televised executions and 'Faces Of Death' compilation films that emerged in the 1970's and 1980's. It also takes a detour into narrative films that deal with snuff - such as Videodrome, The Last House On Dead End Street, and Snuff. Actually, with regards to the last one, there's a chapter devoted to the way Slaughter, an Argentinian riff on the Manson Murders by Michael and Roberta "Touch Of Her Flesh" Findlay was transformed using obviously fake footage into exploitation legend Snuff. Fascinating stuff, if you're that way inclined. It disturbs me that I have nearly every film mentioned in the book. Amazingly appropriate reading in light of the Nick Berg tape.

6. Five books you would take to a desert island...

Psychotic Reactions And Carburetor Dung, by Lester Bangs.

Remember back to the time before your brain was turned into an open sewer due to the toilet-flushings of what passes for modern culture polluted it beyond repair? Lester Bangs lived that time every day of his life, and lived to tell the tale. Ostensibly a collection of record reviews published in Creem and Rolling Stone in the 1970's, the hopelessly doomed Bangs avoided writing about the music per se, and instead wrote about how the music made him feel - resulting in 6,000 words on how Van Morrison's 'Astral Weeks' was a perfect soundtrack to his mental collapse, as 'bugs and spiders were crawling across the mind'. 5,000 words on The Stooges' 'Funhouse' results in Lester laying down the iconography and aesthetic of the moribund 'punk' movement, nearly 7 years before it actually happened. And, just for you art students, there's a selection of Lester's famous interviews with Lou Reed, in which Lester goes from telling US how much of a genius Lou Reed is, to him telling Lou that he is a cocksucker who sold out. Read it - even if only to find the answer to the question: "Is Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music the greatest album ever recorded?"

Any Peanuts Collection - Charles M. Schulz.

We aren't even equipped to BEGIN to fathom the genius of the Peanuts cartoon strip that run from the late 1950's to the untimely death of Charles Schulz. Each three panel strip was a meticulous, gentle, heartbreaking examination of the human condition - visually rendered in the open, bleeding melancholy of Schulz's simple shapes. Each Peanuts character was a microcosm of human personalities - and human failings - and they interacted with an honesty and a sense of the nobility in the failings of the ordinary that will see them live on forever.

The two that I love the most, though...

This is the funniest cartoon strip ever. Every time I read it, I cannot stop laughing.

1. Charlie brown is in his room, looking through a cupboard. "Where is my handkerchief?"

2. Charlie Brown calls out. "Mom? Have you seem my white handkerchief?"

3. Snoopy is outside, standing on his doghouse, with the handkerchief wrapped around his head, Leigonaire-style. "There it is, men! Fort Zinderneuf!"

And the second one... which basically describes my relationship with everyone I've ever met.

1. Patty and Violet are yelling to the right of frame. "Go home! We don't want any little kids following us!"

2. They keep walking. "Go home! Go away! Yeah, little kid!"

3. They still keep walking. "We don't want little kids like you around here! Get out of here!"

4. Charlie Brown standing alone. "Actually, I'm older than both of them. What they're referring to is my emotional immaturity."

Ordinary People, by Judith Guest.

Keeps me honest. Reminds me that maybe there isn't anything to be gained from pretending that the only things worthy of literary inquiry are Deep and Artsy and Inner City. It's just a story about a family which disintegrates after their son dies in a boating accident, and their other son attempts to kill himself from the guilt. Powerful to the point of being uncomfortable, despite its soap opera-ish veneer, this is truly great writing.

Amusing Anecdote: During the first draft of 'Nowhere' - the novel which became my master's thesis - I had to sit my colloquium at the start of my second year. In a colloquium, you basically sit opposite your supervisor, the head of the department, and the head of the school, and you tell them why they shouldn't throw your lazy bones out of the fucking university. My secondary supervisor at the time was narcissistic, pretentious shitbag Justin Clemens - a poet and one-time male model who amused me to no end with the temerity he had to show up for my colluqium without having read a single word of my material on account of being 'too busy'. Too busy for a year and a half, apparently. Anyway, I mentioned that one of my inspirations for the clinical prose that made up the first draft of 'Nowhere' was Judith Guest's 'Ordinary People', and when he heard that, he pulled a face, gave me a bit of 'Oh, you silly, silly boy' head-shaking, and immediately went back to nattering on about Proust or Camus or whatever shit it is that douches like him are into. True story. Fuckin' academics. Fuckin' poets. I hate them all.

The Great Shark Hunt - Hunter S. Thompson

Embodies the great strengths and great failings of my guru and mentor Dr. Hunter Stockton Thompson, this is a wonderful, flailing, formless, angry, broken, tired, drunken mess of a book which veers from straightforward political commentary, to recollections of Hunter's encounter with an aging Mohammed Ali. What else is there to say? Hunter in his prime - and it doesn't carry the baggage of several generations of art students thinking that they're the first ones to be able to recite the whole 'It was somewhere outside Barstow when the drugs began to take hold...' monologue from Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. NEW RULE: Anyone who thinks they are funny, hip, witty, or cool by rattling off that particular piece of prose can LEGALLY be beaten to death with a piece of lead pipe.

And, finally...

The Shining or Carrie - Stephen King.

Yeah, I know. You hate Stephen King. What use does a trendy, cosmopolitan, emo-glasses wearing shitheel like yourself have for one of humanity's biggest sell-outs? Surely, Stephen King is nothing but a noxious, unscrupulous schill for The Man. A no-talent hack who appeals to the lowest common denominator, with his laughable everyman posturing and his bland, featureless prose? Surely, Stephen King is nothing but a brand-name, used to shove another fistful of crowd-pleasing, Hollywood excrement down the throats of an adoring audience of sycophants who wouldn't know good horror - let alone good writing - if Edgar Allen Poe, Clive Barker, and Mario Bava took turns gangbanging them while making them watch 'Carnival Of Souls'?

Fuck off, hippie. Stephen King might have more money than God, but the man rules. Or, at least, he did.

Yeah, I know. So, Big Steve's not been looking so crash hot since he tried his best to defy the laws of quantum physics by occupying the same space as a speeding truck. Yeah, so what if his reputation has more to do with button-pushing bullshit like The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile? Hey - what the fuck do YOU care, hippie, if he was involved in 'Dreamcatcher' - surely THE most inept, incoherent, pretentious, worthless piece of laughable arse-bangery to be foisted upon an undeserving audience by a ruthless, sadistic major American studio?

Once upon a time, he was good. In fact, he was better than good. He was fucking great.

The Shining isn't a horror novel in the traditional sense - it has the trappings of a haunted house story, but it's really about the horror that erupts at the points of fusion between members of a family. And, more importantly, it is one of the most detailed, revealing, and sorrowful examinations of just how the relationships between fathers and sons actually work. Forget the film - Kubrick's a genius, and the film is brilliant... but the film and the book are two completely different beasts. Kubrick is obsessed with the hotel, and with his curious need for perfect symmetry in his set-design and shot construction. King wants you to know what it feels like to say 'I love you, Daddy', and get nothing but a blank stare in return.

And, well - isn't Carrie a rite of passage for all disaffected, adolescent miscreants? Carrie is "The Breakfast Club" for people with an I.Q above 20. Forget the zany telekenetic hijinks that the book is famous for, and think - instead - about the poignant elegance of the central character. Carrie, the novel, is the high school experience - diffused through the prism of the title character's slow degeneration. The beauty = death metaphors that are strewn through the novel could fuel a thousand Dark Nights Of The Soul for wannabe angst poets, and - yet - it works. It works for the same reason that 'The Grapes Of Wrath' works. Or a Springsteen record works. The writer doesn't think that BEING a writer makes him special - he's just reporting from the front lines on how people are existing, day by day. This is King's great strength - the whole 'master of the macabre' bullshit aside.

Or, to quote a great scribe and modern thinker, T-Rex's Marc Bolan: "Book after book, I get hooked every time the writer talks to me like a friend."

7. Who are you passing this stick on to and why?

Tim Train - from Will Type For Food.

To cook your own Tim Train, take one teaspoon of Batman's 'The Riddler', one tablespoon of Anne Coulter, and simmer in a large pot filled with the room-temperature bile and paranoia of Andrew Bolt. Add a dash of Karl Rove to taste. To be served in an unwashed pair of Tim Blair's underpants.

Should make for something interesting.

And, of course.. my beloved Kathryn from jazzyhands.

Because, Kathryn keeps me from killing you, killing me, killing Roger Waters, killing poets, and killing time. You should all want to hear her thoughts, for they glitter like sapphires when all around is pus.

Posted by David at May 24, 2005 03:11 AM | TrackBack