NEXT-LEVEL SPLEEN
I went to my friend’s house to watch a movie while her father was away on business in China. In her BBM to me she had proposed that we watch “something funny like … Clueless.” She made popcorn and whiskey sours in her dad’s kitchen while I stood there watching her, my attention fixed on her hands. I had never seen someone make a drink so elegantly. She dropped ice into the Waterford crystal glasses and the little cubes clinked and flashed in the kitchen’s light like big diamonds. She grabbed me by the arm and took me to her bedroom, where we drank the whiskey sours, took off our clothes, and made out while watching Clueless, visionary film that produced the frenetic self I embody today, adrift in the dreamier American auroras of endless summer. When the movie finished it started again and we watched the sky change. Pollution in the city produces the best sunsets. Tendency in the subject, motivated by spleen, to hate the urban conditions produced by alienation economic and social forces means nothing. I think I just love girls. She jerked me off and I came everywhere. Totalizing systems of thought. “As if,” Cher says in the film a total of four times to vent contemporary spleen against those who misunderstand her. Get rich. Live life to the fullest. Destroy the world.
Later that night my friend said to me, “What do you think, is Cher an exemplary figure of first world mobility and the central conflict of the film is the sudden social intervention against her primary motivating force that she must ‘win back’ through alternative means, that is, as an automobilist whose privilege to a car is revoked and whose life is unshackled to the banality of financial concern of any kind, lack of car equals a death that can only be stopped via some hierarchy-splitting behavior like sleeping with your brother? Or is the film, like, an allegory for the failures of US ecological policy? That whole thing about the Clean Air Act and Wallace Shawn. Something totally dumb like that.” She took a sip of her (second) whiskey sour and put her underwear and bra back on. She sat cross-legged across from me and smiled. I remained still and naked, thinking. “Also you look like the Buddha,” she said.
“Paul Rudd plays her stepbrother ... and I don’t know what that means. Are you, like, calling me fat?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I’m saying you look like the Buddha. Smart, you know.”
I slipped into my form-fitting Calvin Klein briefs. The tight fabric felt good against my cock and made me hard again. She noticed my dick as it grew against my thigh and began to play with it through my underwear, laughing as I squirmed a little. I pushed her hand away.
“I don’t think Clueless is an allegory for the Clinton Administration, with its various failures to respond to the emergent ecological crisis,” I said. “Or any administration for that matter. Rather, I think that Cher is a flâneuse whose primary objective is to be carried through urban space without having to engage it herself. Like, no maps, just the directional privilege of wealth in which events and places simply materialize as though they were designed exclusively for her. Antiflâneuse, really. Like Baudelaire, who walked around but depended on his mother for financial support (like so many male geniuses of the nineteenth century) but updated for a culture on the cusp of GPS. Cher is perfect for LA’s virtually unknowable supersprawl. Like, why bother? The central conflict of the film is not immobility, which, as you say, can only be rectified by some outrageous act against the traditional hierarchy. It is the fact that she does not want to go where she is going if she has to know how to get there. That was her original violation: driving around omnidirectionally without any attention to the regulating restrictions that give form to driving around in the first place. Stop signs, speed limits. Sure, she’s only fifteen, about to turn sixteen, but not driving changes her position in the world such that she has to know how to get somewhere. Not driving allows her to give directions, to be picked up, to be taken somewhere. It’s executive, easier—a non-problem. Sex with her stepbrother only paves over the problem of her position by eliding hers with his such that the unity of their relationship erases the issue that brought them together in the first place. Chauffeur becomes lover: all becomes one. Being a pop film, of course the act is watered down in that she sleeps with her cute but dirty stepbrother, Paul Rudd, instead of a blood relative, which would have been so much more interesting. But Baudelaire didn’t sleep with his mother either, I guess.”
“Um, I didn’t need you to lecture me,” she said.
“Urgh, I wasn’t,” I said.
I woke up late the next day in my friend’s bed, but she was gone. It was the first day of spring break and she had gone ahead to the beach without me. She left a sticky note on the lampshade next to the bed: “Went to beach. Come!” Clueless was still playing on the TV. Cher was in class with the famous playwright Wallace Shawn. In my friend’s soft pillows, I thought about Wallace Shawn and Deborah Eisenberg having breakfast together in Manhattan, saying things like, “Don’t you think The Times made a serious error in its review of Zero Dark Thirty?” Wallace Shawn nods his head and sips his Nespresso. “I do,” he says. On the TV Cher said, “Then I promised Miss Giest I’d start a letter-writing campaign to my congressman about violations of the Clean Air Act. But Mr. Hall”—Wallace Shawn—“was totally rigid. He said my debates were unresearched, unstructured, and unconvincing. As if! I felt impotent and out of control, which I really hate. I needed to find a place where I could gather my thoughts and regain my strength.”
there are ghosts in Paris at the Place de La Concorde
where Baudelaire still wanders for cash
you can’t find them in the obelisk that encodes their presence there
in his poem “Spleen” Baudelaire says the sky is like a lid
that covers the spirit. I imagine Tupperware for the soul
unthinkable to Cher but not to the Home Shopping Network
ur-web of unlimited purchasing power
revved in an engine of love
to perfect for you a home
the pleasure of homemaking is so absolute
if not force in the network in the first place as is the assumption
of both a soul and its container. Above me, the sky is the color
of the Home Shopping Network. In Clueless it’s the same
except it’s also a blue that sweeps toward the ocean in undulation
of wealth’s confidence that it will go on forever
in the lush Hills Clueless foregrounds
in “Spleen,” the speaker is most disturbed to find any attempt
to regain strength is necessarily thwarted by the endless natural
phenomena that surround him. Save the world and nevertheless
it will skinny-dip in a malaise as white as midnight in Dostoevsky
everything is habitual and the soul denatures along these lines to find
the earth and its pollutants describe a transformation
unstoppably beautiful, like, the world is gorgeous
and I am gorgeous and you are gorgeous, even in the inky dark
even on the CalTrain, rising off the horizon
surrounding us to form, as Baudelaire writes, “un chochet humide,”
or as Cher might say: a locker room of gross boys
the fact still remains that the sky is boundless and rumbling
toward us to unchain the light hiding below it, where light
like massive beach balls
comes tumbling down to get MTV’s spring break coverage started
we can fully expect it will wreck us. But to return
to the Place de la Concorde, which is like a Venice Beach of stone
without the beach, so imagine it’s spring break
in Paris where Cher and Dionne dance to Kylie Minogue’s
“Can’t Get You Out of My Head”
spring breakers everywhere dancing to an uptempo
126-beats-per-minute mega hit. This is
what Baudelaire means when he talks about the world
breaking out in a clamor of spirits or, in other words, s
udden awareness
of the Big Other. I can’t get you out of my head
within the city walls music pushes forward to interrupt
this party, reneges any evidence of a despair in a frat boy’s fraternité
Baudelaire says the wind enters his soul
and like any porous category this rupturing is the conclusion
that ends the poem but allows him to keep writing
why Cher goes on without a Jeep and what is referred to in the poem
as Anguish or in Clueless as Paul Rudd
both drop down to plant a black flag
(you can imagine Paul Rudd listening to Black Flag
while lounging with the Modern Library Nietzsche by the pool)
into the poet’s brow or to translate: the subject
acknowledges that in exteriorized forces
the personality is determined by a variety of interventions that enter
the head like big symbolic flags in the conquered soil which
seldom knows its defeat
um, but forgive me for puking, Cher, forgive me
for not whole-sale swallowing this bullshit
which is how Baudelaire begins
“To the Reader” the only contemporary analog of which I can think of
is “Niggas in Paris,” boys’ club of the privileged few
gilded among the merveilleuses and the lights
that have lit the city since 1881 against which millions
of Americans have backdropped among fireworks
avarice, all that, in the poor who in systematized
financialization of the body politic finally resemble
the nothingness that leaps up in Nietzsche to waltz toward
the end of the world at the home of Michael Bay
where we belong is ultimately the holy land, LA
Jeep-bound in the Hills
buried in the sunlight that illuminates
every face with the brightness that accompanies any intimacy
with death, even brain death
but what I truly want to do is be with you, Cher,
and learn to tell the difference between us
the intelligence of Baudelaire is anger with strategy
shovel off the world with boredom
to avoid work and its attendant wage slavery
heinous at the time of the composition of Les Fleurs du Mal
shortly after the Paris Commune
which ended with its destruction
to create “youth culture,” MTV
and its educational programming via MTVu
I’m aware that this has nothing to do with speaking to you,
dear reader, but isn’t this what Baudelaire is talking about
when he runs up against the wall of the world
which encircles an obelisk of the world
standing in the middle of Paris it’s like the word incroyable
a mouthful of revolutionary policy
like “ours” in Egypt
from which Paris imported the Obelisk of Luxor to the Place de la Concorde
a gift from the self-appointed Egyptian Viceroy Muhammad Ali Pasha
was constructed to exalt Ramses II
whose teeth rotted out of his head a pharaoh
whose reign lasted longer than any single French Republic ever has
nowhere to be found in “Au Lecteur” but its singular message as important
then as today: WATCH THE THRONE
never lost on the incroyables and merveilleuses
meaningless outside of some limited revolutionary context
which has subsequently absolved us of any need to be literate in its politics
who emerged at the end
of the reign of terror to infuse Paris
with the rare air of empire parties
fanning themselves with peacock feathers
gripping staffs wrapped in gold lamé
awash in a river
of luxury like a Bank of America exec in 2009
the pistons of the new world are pumping much faster, reader,
out of culture-bound mysteries
that rest here in the sun
while you, stand there still as always
antiflâneur or -flâneuse in memory of Cher
not singer-songwriter but the blonde
whose dusty complexion
mocks the world she faces to save
everything everywhere submerged in the moral philosophy
of “Niggas in Paris”
where the individual balls hard
in the exclusive right to be fair
self-determined in Paris getting fucked up
or getting married, as Kanye says, in the mall
no longer an important reference to the focal point of commerce at the end
of the nineteenth century but to every undergraduate
whose thesis quotes The Arcades Project extensively
in the morality of “Niggas in Paris”
like “To the Reader” it ultimately becomes itself
a teacup ethics to be thrown against the flower
wallpaper of the sitting room
reader, disengage
from the utopia of “my zone”
in a plume of desire
destroyed but alive, like you like me like blood
There is an infinite highway that builds toward Cher’s Jeep. Everything is the pop gradient of Tumblr, even the desert in which the highway begins from our point of view. From our point of view the highway begins everywhere. Sunglasses and Advil, everything is mad real. For others, it begins with the faces of the dead, Ronald Reagan, Jacques Derrida, Gertrude Stein, mixed with the dust from which the road starts. Horizons mean nothing. Horizons mean the albatross has been captured and is dying, slung across the deck of the ship toward the teary-eyed sailors burdened by its bad luck. The procedure that envelops us culminates in a disavowal of the system we benefit from more substantially than we know. There is no other choice, art markets shift, make room for more art, then disappear. What is the light that springboards off the surface of a pool in the Hills? The white Jeep, pure symbol of wartime ingenuity married to lives of leisure, sits in the driveway and commands us to bow down. I was in awe as a child. I was in awe as an adult, too. Perfect suspension and a lightweight exterior both affordable and transmutable, the luminous soul of the entire project dwells there. A word that means so little and yet suggests the undoing of its own simplicity: Jeep. Two e’s like in spleen, which Cher meant when she cursed her driving instructor for not giving her a pass. As if. Take away a car and you still have a passenger. I take walks everywhere I go, even in the supersprawl. Los Angeles, the antithetical capital to preservation, accelerates the speed at which we consume in order to perfect a place in the future as the site of the future. LA translates today into tomorrow by noon. But tonight, we can relax in the waterfalls of the Hilton as they flood with bubbles and champagne.
LANDSCAPES WITHOUT END
Clouds can archive. My fantasy is a landscape. Sometimes I daydream about merging my body with my computer so that I can more fully enter the landscapes of Google Earth, lush surface world without pollution or traffic, planet seen from the vantage point of space and roving surveillance vehicles, a motionless field, magnifying the normal imperfections and irregularities of the earth so that the planet is rendered transparent, misshapen and yet intoxicating in its languishing distinction from the real. Where are the palm trees swaying toward tonight? Standing at the beach nothing fails to come to mind, but out of blue prevalence thinking comes in waves. Am I my own vision? I am stretched beyond it, but beyond that, other oceans we hadn’t known, lost continents restored in code. Where should we enter? The point where the digital camera clicks to record dusty boys playing by the side of the road? Weather in Google is fixed.
The night of Hurricane Sandy, I smoked a lot of pot, then looked at photos on Twitter of the flooding in the East Village, lower Manhatt
an, Queens, and Red Hook until the power went out, my phone died, and I passed out in my friend’s West Village apartment. (News of Staten Island and New Jersey hadn’t reached us yet.) The last thing I recall was another friend texting me to say that the city was evacuating the East Village in boats. Was that in my dream, I thought, the point where the present surpasses the expectations of history to bring about a future we were told we had propelled away? Windows blasted open. My favorite trees fell. The streetlights did not work when I was driven to Brooklyn two days later. This is what happens when you aren’t paying attention and, over the hill, a car arrives with bad news, news that seemed impossible but in retrospect was the only news you could have received. I fell on a pillow. In my dreams I woke and found that everything west of 6th Avenue had sunk into the Hudson, which was now the ocean. I rushed with the others to the shore to take a picture. I stood on the beach where the last part of 7th Avenue remained, staring at the dark waters of the new world splashing up against the old one. I remember taking the Staten Island Ferry one night, the height of the following summer, and in a rage throwing my glasses overboard. I remember reading that anecdote in Joe Brainard’s I Remember and thinking it was my life he’d remembered.
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