656660 alfred hugged tricky
The Voskhod programme shot two dogs into space on 22 February 1966 and brought them safely back to Earth on 16 March 1966; but the Soviets kept the mission's purpose a secret, refusing to disclose even the sex of the dogs. During their 22 days in orbit, Veterok ("Little Wind") and Ugolyok ("Little Lump of Coal") passed through the Van Allen radiation belt, which suggests that they were being tested for the effect of prolonged exposure to cosmic rays. Less than five years earlier, in Fantastic Four #1 (November 1961), Jack Kirby and Stan Lee had presented a scenario in which cosmic rays transformed four humans into four superhumans who wielded superpowers corresponding to the four Greek elements. The nature of Veterok's and Ugolyok's superpowers is a state secret to this day. All we know is that they held the record for longest mammalian spaceflight until the men of Skylab 2 surpassed it in 1973. They remain the canine record-holders. For their troubles -- 22 days of no walks -- they were immortalized on a stamp. Good dogs.
Dog aficionados take dogs' goodness as a given. Given a good home and a clear idea of what's expected of them, dogs will be good. They'll love, get loved, lay one paw over the other, and never wonder where all the time went. Having no choice but to be good, dogs go to space as slaves or sacrifices. There but for the grace of God go we. Alas, we're blessed and cursed with the choice to be good. What if pets ...... are smarter than we think ...!? Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine stares up into my eyes expectantly and then stares into the middle distance and then stares out the window. He's a pea-brain, a dick-brain, a senile octogenarian, a baby. What if he ... has understood everything ...... that I've been saying ........... this whole time ...!? He has seen me on the toilet and heard me speak nonsense when no one else was around. He has witnessed my rages and my most boring days. He has watched straightwad porn with me. He'd have all the dirt on everybody if he only had a human brain, but his goodness in humans' eyes depends on his lack of one. With a reasoning brain, he'd have to justify capturing and torturing birds. He'd bear part of the responsibility of defining his own goodness, which would expose him to the risk of being wrong.
Although David Foster Wallace's brain murdered David Foster Wallace -- who wrote at length on the debilitating effects of owning a brain -- most brain-on-self crime is boring. Ordinary brains owned by people who aren't called geniuses commit brain-on-self crime every day. Brains that stop short of self-murder tend to settle for laziness, addiction, and narcissism -- mental felonies that inspire repeat offenders and help keep psychiatry, the self-help industry, and organized religion in business. As much grief as Santa Claus takes for symbolizing capitalist excesses, we need him less as a toy supplier than as a reassurance that an external standard of goodness abides, as it does for household pets -- that goodness can be measured and attained in a practical sense. That there's a treat in it for us is just a bonus.
SPAIN: But it just seemed to me as a kid, not being very sophisticated, I wanted to be good, and I guess as you say [the Catholic Church] was some sort of standard by which you could define yourself as good. As you get older, you increasingly see the evil of the world. This seemed to be a way to attempt to counter that with some personal goodness. The first teacher I had in religious instruction was a very nice nun … you know, she was like some nun out of the movies, a very kind old lady who expounded a very benign religious ideology, so it seemed cool.
[...]
GROTH: Would your conception of liberty and justice for all include economic equality?
SPAIN: Yeah, definitely, right. I think that most people who have a good balance between productive, fulfilling work and pleasure are basically happy. I think people get loaded all the time as a substitute for therapy. They are people who are trying to work something out. While things can and should be set up so that everyone has the material basis for a decent life, including work at decent wages, access to means of improving their skills, etc., some sort of opportunity has to be made to provide circumstances where even the fucked-up can be useful too ... I think everybody, whatever their ideology, wants to see a society of the useful rather than a society of the useless. And I think that there is a strong impulse in people to want to be useful.
-- excerpts from Gary Groth's interview of Spain Rodriguez, The Comics Journal #204, May 1998
photograph by Phoebe Gloeckner
The alternative to an external good is the asspain of all asspains: an internal good that one continually has to maintain, and to negotiate against other people's versions of good; a good to which one can never not pay attention, in the sense that one can't not pay attention to an old, high-mileage car engine or a crying, shitting baby. Faced with such a deeply annoying task, most normal people will choose the moral equivalent of a factory preset: WWJD, liberal humanism, Objectivism, or punk rock, maybe. Moral relativists, supervillains, and crazy people march to their own beats, as do a minority of totally normal people. Remember that in a population of 7 billion humans with over a million years of evolution under their belts (since the first instances of Homo erectus), there's a sense in which nobody's abnormal. Everybody's mad. The ability to use language is mad. Therefore, nobody's mad. Everybody's normal.
Back when I worked at the big chain bookstore in Hicksville, there was a guy named Alfred who worked in the bookstore's café and was completely mad. Alfred was a light-skinned black man in his early 20s who stood about 5'8", had dreadlocks, and was disliked by ladies. It wasn't that he was bad-looking or mean or that he lacked good hygiene. It wasn't clear to me at the time what it was, precisely, that bothered the ladies. Pheromones? Let's ask my wife about it.
"What about a person might make you dislike them, even if they're friendly and clean and not ugly?"
"People who blame other people for their problems all the time drive me mad."
"All right, well, I don't think Alfred was like that, or at least his work colleagues didn't know him well enough to know what his problems were or whom he blamed for them. Although later, when he and his father sued his doctors ...? Hmm hmm maybe he was a person who blames other people, but that's not why the ladies shunned him."
"Well, ladies are also well attuned to mental illness or any kind of social weirdness. A lot of ladies might find sociopaths attractive, but the schizophrenia side of mental illness ..."
"It's like you're hardwired to run the other direction from that."
"We're sensitive to the subtle cues."
"Have you ever disliked an otherwise normal guy because of his smell?"
"Yes. That happened."
"And it wasn't B.O."
"No, it was something else."
"Do you think you can smell madness?"
"Don't try to attribute any crazy quotes to me in your diary."
At any rate, the ladies at the bookstore never confessed to smelling madness on Alfred, but that doesn't mean they didn't. When Indiana Jones or Han Solo had "a bad feeling about this", did we try to break that feeling into its component parts? The bookstore ladies had a bad feeling about Alfred. Meanwhile, I liked him. He'd won me over with a few words in Tagalog -- oldest trick in the book. His dad had worked for the State Department or something, so Alfred had lived in the Philippines for a spell and gone to International School Manila. One day at work, Alfred said, "Hey, I've got something for you" and handed me a diary filled with collages and poems he'd made.
"Thank you, Alfred," I said.
"You're welcome," he said.
Later, I noticed that the collages weren't pasted down onto the diary's pages, but were wedged into the book's binding, insecurely held in place like pressed flowers. Alfred approached me later in the day and said, "I'm gonna need that back after you're done with it."
The bookstore ladies made fun of him for the way he pounded his chest twice with one fist and then gave the peace symbol. "Word," said Alfred. Even though he was black, his Ebonics sounded contrived, they complained.
My then-girlfriend Natalie and I picked Alfred up from his house once to go to a party. His mother's voice came from down the hallway: "Don't stay out too late, Alfred." In the car, we had totally normal conversations. At the party, Alfred acted totally normal, which annoyed the ladies. Later, after we dropped him off, Natalie told me that Alfred had reached into the front seat and "played with" her right ear. None of us spoke of it afterwards, and I stopped trying to hang out with Alfred outside of work.
In January 1997, my good friend Erica and I went to hear Tricky, who was on tour in support of Pre-Millennium Tension. In the middle of what was already one of the most memorable shows I'd seen, Alfred suddenly hopped up on stage and seized a microphone that had been abandoned for a moment by Tricky's collaborator and baby mama, Martina Topley-Bird. In Erica's ear, I said,
"Holy shit, that's Alfred."
"Oh!" she said.
The yellow-shirted event security staff moved to apprehend Alfred, but Tricky waved them off. Tricky let Alfred rap a verse or two -- something about how hard it is for ghetto brothers and sisters -- and then, with a dial twist, he avalanched Alfred's wack-ass rhymes under a hail of thunderous beats. Alfred, now looking a bit hurt, replaced the mic, walked over to Tricky, and hugged him with a mixture of gratitude and desperation. In my mind's VCR, it plays as one of Spike Lee's trademark double hugs, or even a triple or quadruple hug. Alfred hugged Tricky. Alfred hugged Tricky. Alfred tried to chat with a glum-looking Martina for a minute as she instinctively recoiled from his attentions, and then, finally, he left the stage.
After the show, I congratulated Alfred weakly on his star-making performance. He feigned modesty and seemed vaguely angry and distracted, like a real famous person. Erica confessed to me that when I'd said, "That's Alfred", she'd assumed that Alfred was one of those one-name pop stars with whom she should have been familiar. In the next issue of the local alternative weekly, a review of the concert reported that there had been murmurs in the crowd that the unknown stage interloper was none other than Prince, who had also happened to be in town that night for his own concert. Alas, the writer knew better. It was just some kid, an MC wannabe.
Back @ work, Alfred went missing. When he showed up after a week of calling in sick, he confided to me that he'd followed Tricky on tour; that he and Martina had had coffee together; that they'd had an incredible conversation. He quit or got fired from the café not long after that.
I never saw Alfred again, but his name and photograph did pop up in the paper a year later after he killed his mother with a baseball bat. The paper reported that he'd returned home after a night out and crashed his car into the side of the house. When the first police officer arrived at the scene, Alfred was standing outside smoking a cigarette. "I just killed my mother," he said. The court found him not guilty by reason of insanity. It turns out that two months prior to the homicide, during a hospital stay, Alfred had slashed his own throat, exposing the trachea. At his trial, mental health professionals testified that he'd been exhibiting schizophrenia and bipolar disorder since he was 16. While being transported by police from one mental health facility to another, Alfred kicked out a window and threw himself out of the moving vehicle. He lived. Seven years after the homicide, the same judge that accepted Alfred's insanity plea ruled that he no longer posed a threat to society as long he continued to receive therapy and medication, and ordered his release. He has stayed out of the news since then. In a Facebook picture, he stands in front of a body of water. There's a bridge and a crane in the background, and buildings that look European. He's got his arm around the waist of a medium pretty, blonde, girl-next-door-ish white woman. He's fatter, and his 'locks are long gone. My wife examines the picture.
"Pretend you didn't hear the story behind it," I say. "Does that man have crazy eyes?"
But that's the problem right there. Once a person has heard a story, there's no un-hearing it. A judge, a lawyer, a team of mental health "experts", and the ghost of his mother might argue that Alfred has been rehabilitated; but even if you believe them, you're going to see crazy eyes. And that's why we tell children stories instead of handing them user's manuals. By the time they figure out that not all stories are true -- or that too many stories are true for one person to contain them all -- it's too late. Consider how many stories an adult living in an advanced capitalist civilization has heard, and how each of those stories contains a version of what "good" means. Naturally, some stories get told more than others, and some stories are more invisible than others.
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"
-- David Foster Wallace, commencement speech to Kenyon College's graduating class of 2005
What if ...... we're drowning in "good" things ........... and don't even know it? What if we're not drowning, but the only reason we're not drowning is that we don't know what water is? What if state-assisted corporate capitalism got so good at telling stories that it forgot that state-assisted corporate capitalism is itself a story? How many times did DFW watch The Matrix? How does The Matrix feel about being inside the Matrix? How many roads must a man walk down before a computer can tell the difference between a male writer and a female one? In the 1950s, "good" Americans considered Communism so dangerous, so un-American, that they banned suspected Communists from telling stories, which marked both the beginning of the Cold War and the beginning of the end of the Cold War. While it's true that Hollywood KO'd Communism, it did so by virtue of a super-narrative that contradicts and ultimately transcends Ronald Reagan's official narrative. In a nutshell, Hollywood neutralized Communism by lionizing it. Knowing that banning a story only makes it stronger (see also: Deep Throat (Damiano, 1972)), the gods of American capitalism gave Communism's story an artificial boost. Suddenly, Communism was much more cool than it was; and because cool things carry social status and wealth-making potential in a capitalist society, now it could be bought and sold. Che Guevara baby tees were born.
In the same way, Kapital absorbs every story that can be thrown at it. It lets all stories happen, knowing that it can level up at any time and render any narrative a sub-narrative. Gun control? Gun apologism? You got pwned. Feminism, anti-racism, environmentalism, "nostalgia for simpler times" (i.e., white supremacy). Pwned, pwned, pwned, pwned. Even anti-capitalism, especially anti-capitalism, any permutation. Even this story that I'm telling now. *Stops typing, goes grocery shopping, returns before anyone has noticed, continues typing.* In an essay addressing nostalgia for pre-capitalist forms of subsistence, lazenby, the great Internet cipher, posed the dilemma this way:
There are any number of problems that we try and escape by embracing what seem to be their opposites. But even when we’re wrapped all the way around whatever we’ve come up with, we still feel tasked. It’s the feeling of running between a thing and its opposite, while slowly realizing that no matter how extreme you get, you’re still stuck in the same frame. Which contains both.
... All of those compromises rankle, and spear us on false dichotomies, and then make us crave a third way.
Lazenby then submits AA as a third way between addiction and legislative prohibition -- a way for the powerless to reclaim lost power and remake society on a more user-friendly scale. A few years ago, Livejournal might have embodied a sane third way between creation and consumption, between narcissism and hero worship, between Internet addiction and going off the grid. To those of us who won't either live in a literal yurt and hunt rabbits or try to sell a worthless app to Facebook for roughly $1 billion in cash and stock, third ways aren't little oases away from culture; they're our way of getting through every day with dignity, with confidence, with bonhomie, without addiction, without a stack of chips on our shoulders, with a bit of class and style, with a story.
The late, great Marxist cartoonist Spain Rodriguez marked a third path throughout his life. As a child, he was a skeptic who was attracted to organized religion. He was a Spanish American who joined the Jewish Cub Scouts. As a teenager, he was a juvenile delinquent immersed in the nerdiest of interests -- reading and making comix. As a grown man, he was an anti-racist who joined a racist motorcycle gang; a feminist who boned a lot of ladies; a Stalinist who admired the U.S. Constitution; a bar brawler and a sweetheart. Somehow, unlike his ectomorphic friend R. Crumb, Spain resolved the various tensions in himself with a minimum of neurotic handwringing. His work combines a sketchbook unfussiness with robotic accuracy. His figures look like warm robots, like horny action figures. He was great at drawing cars and motorcycles. Justin Green confirms that Spain's working methods were congruent with the gracefulness of his finished product: "He would be ensconced in an easy chair in front of a day/night TV, dashing off authoritative and bold ink lines from minimum penciling." By virtue of being born in the current era, Spain was as much a capitalist as any other American, but his resistance to his birthright lacked the dust cloud of despair that follows most leftists. His view of personal freedom echoes Alan Moore's "last inch" but spins it with alpha male fearlessness:
“It seems to refer to the core of the American vision or the democratic vision, that there’s an aspect of yourself that you owe to your society in terms of omission and commission, but there’s an aspect of your life that you don’t owe to anybody. This is something that there’s a constant fight over. In terms of underground comix they certainly broke through that fifties fantasy that conservatives are so dedicated to maintaining, despite that fact that it was a fantasy in the fifties, and now it’s an absurd charade. Comic books are really something that are part of some core of this country. And that’s the struggle. Liberty and justice for all should mean you can say what you want. Unless you can show some tangible harm I’m doing to somebody, fuck off. That’s the battle line I want to be on. I intend to remain here until they carry me away on my back. If it doesn’t sound too grandiose, I think the undergrounds were really a continuation of the American Revolution. Hell, it sounds too grandiose, but so what?”
Raging against the machine isn't good enough. If social change occurs only when large numbers of people all decide to do the same thing at the same time, what happens when one half of a nation is continuously enraged at the other half, and the government becomes an effigy upon which each side projects the crimes of the opposite side? President Obama is definitely a socialist, or President Obama is definitely a warmongering corporate shill, but President Obama is never an accurate composite of the consumerist impulses of 300 million Americans. Consider the word unplugged in The Last Psychiatrist's discussion of the link between rage and narcissism:
You might think that the rage is the spark for a transformation of America, a full scale Dagny Taggart meltdown or Bolshevik revolution, depending on your hat. That's not how it works. If this is narcissism, then its purpose is protecting identity, defending against change. Doesn't matter what side you think you're on, unless you are unplugged you are for the status quo.
Since nobody can read that sentence without being plugged in, it might as well be translated as, "Unless you did not read this sentence, you are for the status quo." A fish is a fish so long as it doesn't get out of the water and walk on land.
Getting out of the water isn't good enough. Jim Jones and the People's Temple got out of the water; but their communal hopelessness -- their feeling that their communist experiment had failed -- affirmed the guilt that keeps capitalism from flying apart. "Revolutionary suicide" rejects and reinforces capitalist guilt in the same dying breath. It's the "Hotel California" of revolutionary acts.
If in Capitalism transcendence is replaced with immanence, Benjamin continues, salvation is replaced by guilt. If the potential to achieve absolution exists in the actuality, if one can be saved in the here and now, then any failure to do so, any disappointment or unhappiness in the present immediately manifests itself as guilt: “Capitalism is probably the first instance of a cult that creates guilt, not atonement”.
-- Pil and Galia Kollectiv on Walter Benjamin, excerpt from "Capitalism as Cult"
Kollectiv's article submits Scientology as a third way that one day might supplant both capitalism and religion:
Unlike the hippie cults of the 1960s and ‘70s, [Scientology] was established by L. Ron Hubbard in concomitance with contemporary power, rather than as a radical break with it: “We seek no revolution. We seek only evolution to higher states of being for the individual and for society”.
And that's how human history works, maybe. An idea starts out as a joke or as a science fiction story dreamed up by a pill addict; but the idea proves useful for somebody because every story is useful to somebody. The story gets longer, more organized, and more polished; and it gets disseminated; and it tells readers, "You've been taking the blue pill this whole time. Now here's the red pill." And then after a couple generations of people who were born hearing the funny story, it's not funny anymore; it's not even a story; it's like oxygen. It's like a glass of tap water morphed into the sea.
GROTH: Of course, the perverse thing now, though, is that the people who are doing mainstream comics really consider themselves to be almost entirely free to do what they want, because that’s what they want to do. So you have that new-found paradox where the kind of crap that people were essentially forced to do for commercial reasons is now being done out of some sort of inner need or inner impulse. [Laughs.] You can’t win, Spain.
Every time somebody makes fun of bad grammar or celebrates good grammar without remembering what grammar's for -- no, not for marking differences in education and social status, but for making one's ideas understood -- that's the glass of tap water pretending it's not a glass of tap water.
I was going to make a year-end post cataloguing all the good things that made 2012 get loved, but when I started asking what "good" meant, this post is what came out instead. Naturally, Aristotle settled the question something like 100 years ago --
"[I]n Aristotle's view, the soul has three sorts of components. These are our passions, our faculties and our states of character. Our passions are our feelings, our desires, fears, ambitions etc. Our faculties are our natural capacities for feeling and acting in the various ways that we can. Our states of character can be thought of as complex tendencies or dispositions to act and feel in certain ways under certain circumstances. Given this view of what the soul consists of, moral virtues must be identified with one of these three. Aristotle rules out the first two possibilities and is left with the view that virtues are states of character.
"Virtues cannot be passions, Aristotle claims, because we are not praised or blamed for the way we feel, but we are praised or blamed for our virtues. We are not praised or blamed for our feelings because they arise more or less involuntarily in response to circumstances. Aristotle's reason for denying that virtues are faculties is similar. Part of a person's faculties consist of his or her ability to feel anger. B[ut] we do not praise or blame people for having the ability to feel anger. Rather, we praise people for tending to manifest their ability to feel anger when, and only when, the circumstances call for it. So virtues are not to be identified with our capacities either. Virtues must, therefore, be states of character."
-- W. Russ Payne, excerpt from "Aristotle on Virtue", Google's #1 hit for "aristotle on virtue"
-- but it's sort of neglectful to update my version of "good" less frequently than my version of iTunes. Anyhow, Aristotle wasn't an American; his story never had to compete with the narrative Frankenstorm of the Internet chattering class; and ancient Greek schoolkids never got shot up by skinny weird guys. Naturally, I haven't been able to stop thinking about Alfred, playing his story backward and forward like the Zapruder film in search of redemptive potential. Whether Tricky hugged back or not is lost to history, which means George Lucas is free to CGI it however he wants.
Happy new year, Livejournal. Hug responsibly, and have a virtuous and grammatical 2013.
+ + +
THE COUNTDOWN:
33. AISLERS SET "Mary's Song" (7.3 MB)
32. YOU AM I "Heavy Heart" (4.4 MB)
31. RADIOACTIVE SAGO PROJECT "Astro" (5.3 MB)
30. BIG STAR "Thirteen" (3.5 MB)
29. DE KIFT "Nauwe Mijter" (5.0 MB)
28. TH CLEAN "Anything Could Happen" (2.5 MB)
27. JOHN FAHEY "Jaya Shiva Shankarah" (7.0 MB)
26. FEELIES "Forces @ Work" (9.8 MB)
25. LIFE W/O BUILDINGS "Sorrow" (9.5 MB)
24. TEENAGE FANCLUB "Broken" (7.3 MB)
23. PHYLLIS DILLON "Don't Stay Away" (3.7 MB)
22. MATUMBI "Wipe Them Out" (4.0 MB)
21. SISTER NANCY "Bam Bam" (4.5 MB)
20. FENWYCK "Mindrocker" (4.2 MB)
19. ADRIANO CELENTANO "Stai Lontana Da Me" (2.0 MB)
18. SHUGGIE OTIS "Strawberry Letter 23" (5.5 MB)
17. LEE MOSES "Time and Place" (2.8 MB)
16. FUNKADELIC "You and Yr Folks, Me and My Folks" (5.0 MB)
15. LISA "Rocket to Yr Heart" (17.5 MB)
14. MEDICAL MISSIONARIES OF MARY CHORAL GROUP "Angels Watching over Me" (3.0 MB)
13. TIM BUCKLEY "Song to th Siren" (7.6 MB)
12. KARA "We're w/ You" (7.8 MB)
11. ERNIE K-DOE "Here Come the Girls" (4.3 MB)
10. DONNY HATHAWAY "What's Goin' On" (7.9 MB)
09. NANCY SINATRA "You Only Live Twice" (5.4 MB)
08. DENNIS BROWN "Sitting & Watching" (8.0 MB)
07. PATRICE O'NEAL "Race War" (7.6 MB)
06. NINA SIMONE "Why Keep On Breaking My Heart" (3.6 MB)
05. IDA "Little Things" (6.0 MB) -- This is one of the things that happened to punk in the 1990s. It turned down the volume; questioned conventional social relationships from the inside instead of from the outside; and stopped trying to fetishize confusion as a sexy thing. Littleton and Mitchell double down on the line "I'll try to understand", and their harmonizing generates a third path between overconfidence and defeat. As Mulder or Errol Morris might say, behaving as if the truth is out there is the only way to earn our confusion.
Bonus track:
UNKNOWN CAMBODIAN ARTIST "Final Countdown" (4.8 MB) -- Nearly done with lostcosmonaut. Hang in there.