Art and Beauty and The Sheer Pointlessness Of It All
In the summer of 1998 I had a job at Bob Evens. I was bussing tables for minimum wage. I wanted to go home every summer, back then. I didn't want to stay in Ann Arbor. Picking up a summer job was tough, back then. No one really wanted to hire you. Not if you were up front about the fact that you just wanted to work there two weeks. Occasionally, some kind-hearted soul--such as my boss at Bob Evens--would offer me job and I'd take it. Short-term employment.
I wanted to go home where my friends were, that and the lake at my parents house. I wanted that, too. I was still paying rent on the place back in Ann Arbor, for Christ's sake. Part of the reason I even had a job (at all) was because I had to pay for a room in a crackhouse I wasn't even staying at.
At one point, during that summer, aum and I took a side job from his shitty job's shitty boss. We were delivering sales circulars to every residence and newsstand within twenty miles of the shitty grocery store. The money we made helped to pay for the wear and tear on our vehicles.
About ten thousand of those circulars wound up in the dumpster behind Bob Evens, one night. When I passed the Party EXPress along to Purple Heart, a couple of years back, I dug one out from behind the passenger seat. There were a few survivors. But once Seth and I grasped how utter pointless what we were doing was, in light of the fact that the shitty boss had ordered way more of these damn things than he really needed, we decided that they needed to be ditched.
Later that night, I roasted a fat, k.b. hog in my car, in the driveway. Powerful shit. I had the windows rolled up because I was afraid the smoke from the burning log of weed would get the sleeping neighbors high. I listened to NPR and tripped balls.
Afterwards, I went down to the lake and sat on the dock. I sat down in a pile of duckshit and stared up at the moon. It was probably in the first week of August that this happened. The moon was low and fat and just dangling over the lake. So bright that it swallowed up the clouds with white. As the clouds moved, you'd occasionally see a tunnel leading up to the moon. Beautiful. I sat there so long, watching the moon and its reflection move over the face of the stillest waters. . . not even a ducks wake rolling over it. The tree line and the tree line reflected in the water circled me entirely. Laying down on my back and hanging my head over the side of the dock, I felt--momentarily--like I was suspended in the very center of a giant sphere.
But that spectacle awakened a sense. . . a new sense of appreciation for The Pointless. Beauty. . . really beauty. . . is pointlessness itself. You can have your window. You can have your door. But as soon as you decorate them, you are introducing The Pointless to your otherwise functional doors and windows. We judge, often incorrectly, that a people are or are not civilized on the basis of their appreciation of The Pointless.
And so, there on the dock, the thought had crossed my tetrahydrocannabinol-saturated mind that our lives were at their most beautiful when utter pointlessness was wholly embraced.
Naked Absurdity. Put your tongue in her ear and see if she likes it.
The following day, Seth and I rented a few movies from this comic book store out in Waterford. One of them was *The Island of the Mushroom People.* The other was *Daughter of Darkness.*
Everything that I've been talking about, up until now, fell away. The words "stripped to the core" came to mind, when my mind occasionally returned to me, while watching this film. We were sitting, in the basement, on cool patches of carpet on the cold, cold floor. And we had this old VCR running this worn down tape, playing it out on the screen of this television that had dials.
The film made me numb. Cold inside. Occasionally, there'd be an interlude of utter confusion. . . a break in the nausea in which I was able to ask myself "What the FUCK am I watching?"
This. . . this spectacle was lensed in Hong Kong in the early nineties. Just before Hong Kong was handed back to Beijing on a silver platter. *Daughter of Darkness* calls into a genre that is--by some--called Category III. These Cat3 films are pretty much the logical extension of the fast and furious, rough and tough Black Films. of the seventies and eighties. More 'n' Faster and Bad As Hell, these films were as nasty as you could get.
From what I've read, lately, *Daughter of Darkness* is one of the worst, or one of the best. However you want to look at it.
In the seven years since I've seen it, nothing's even come close as far as appalling the senses goes.
The movie is about a girl with a shitty homelife. Her father sexually abuses her, regularly, humiliates her, regularly, and is just a total asshole. Her mother is in constant denial of the problem. She secretly has a boyfriend, who bones her, regularly, on camera. On her birthday, her boyfriend proposes marriage--or some such shit--and she accepts, and she is happy and then she's getting boned. She goes home. Her old man's found out her boyfriend and he's there waiting for her, shitfaced. The mother and the other kids are hiding in the bedroom. He smears her with birthday cake and fucks her in the ass while singing "Row, Row, Row Your Boat." The boyfriend shows up and all Hell breaks loose. The girl is the sole survivor of the massacre, and it comes out in the trial that she's knocked up. She has the kid, it's taken away, she's brought before the firing squad and shot dead. The end.
The bloodsoaked finale is good enough to make you want to puke. The scenes leading up to it are enough to make parts of your conscious mind shut down entirely. Confusion occasionally arises when the director breaks the harrowing tale of abuse and revenge up with softcore porn, lowbrow comedy, and daily scenes of Hong Kong life. And yet the creepiness permeated everything. The creepiness extended beyond the television screen to the very center of my being. I got the sense I was looking at something that Never Should Have Been.
Apparently, Cat3 films have been on the wane, in Hong Kong. At least the horror genres. Some people suggest that Beijing has a lot to do with that. They're probably right. The premise of authority figures being thoroughly corrupt and wantonly, ravenously abusive probably gets one bad nerve twitching. But then again, Hong Kong films in general have been on the wane ever since Blockbuster set up shop and the local HK rental chain went tits-up.
A host of films, films which may or may not fall short of Daughter of Darkness (in terms of shock-value, I mean), were just churned out one after the other. In the early nineties, people dug these things. They were churned out in short periods of time on shoestring budgets and wound up raking in so much money that they were burying "mainstream" releases. Many of them had that "true crime," slant. . . In Hong King, where murder rates have always been relatively low, this might explain a bit of these films' popularity. Local scandals revealed, you know?
Why Hong Kongers were buying into highly sexualized violence and relentless brutality is anyone's guess, really. I've read too many generic psychoanalytic interpretations to put much stock in any unified theory. Especially one that pussyfoots around with the likes of Lacan and Freud. And I'm not going to attempt, right here and now, to go beyond the clues I've spun out above. Not yet. Not for what went through the minds of most of HK movie-goers minds, at least.
Me, I look back that cold, cold ninety some-odd minutes and only remember the occasional, maybe guilty, even, sensation that I was seeing something that shouldn't have been. The blatant and excessive misanthropy guiding these films, in thought, word and deed (in a manner of speaking), repelled me then and repels me now.
It repelled me. I forgot all about Bob Evens. About the DJ FOOD I'd heard the night before, about the lake, about the crackhouse. "I" went away. It's that feeling of selflessness that all good art--from the very top to the very bottom--inspires. I'm talking good trash-cinema, like *Daughter of Darkness.* I'm talking good-porno, like *Miko Lee aka Filthy Whore.* (Sure.) I'm talking good blockbusters (I'll revise this line when I see one, for the sake of using a title.) I'm referring to the better passages of *Tropic of Capricorn.* I'm also referring to *The Dark Half.* I'm talking about *The Simpsons,* and I'm talking about *The Hogan Family.* From Makoto to Madonna. All of it.
It's the loss of ego that brings me to art--and here, feel free to tack on your broadest or narrowest definition of art--that interests me, nowadays. I remember that loss of self, that no-self, and I remember that self enveloping the sense of no-self.
And it seems quite funny to me, the civilization collapses in on itself at it's highest point. Or maybe it's only the case with the inhabitants of civilization, the civilized, I guess. At civilization's peak, there is the surrender of self. Past civilization's highest point, there is The Pointless.
Your history of art books will open up with the earliest known artifacts, the cave-etchings, the jewelry, the little idols, and they'll tell you that art--initially--was joined at the hip with religion.
Where has it gone since?
Religion evolved into asceticism, the renunciation of this-worldly Points.
That's probably taking it too far. This is the internet. That is my present medium. Here. Now. What are you doing here? You should be buying something, or looking at porn.
