THE CHISELER

Putting “acceptable” limits on depravity in the name of compromise and “reality” is how fascism eventually triumphs. Or so said Professor Yvonne De Carlo of ‘Miss Yvonne’s Academy for Wayward Hussies’ also known as 'The Frankfurt School’ –  a place of higher learning for delinquent, pregnant scholars. “Your new president is merely proof that the depraved nature of power is given license by tolerating all but its excesses” said Professor De Carlo as she powdered her ample cleavage in full view of the astonished, pinafore-clad undergrads gathered for her lecture on the 'Dialectic of Fascism and French Manicures Made Easy-Peasy’.

“You want to know what brought Trump to power? Hint: It wasn’t a sudden, inexplicable, sewage-strewn wave of raw hatred poised to strike down public schools, libraries and national parks at the behest of a braying, stupid mob of "privileged” former factory workers. It wasn’t merely insanity wrought by decades of institutional neglect or unchecked greed – although that was a big part of it. It was *nice* people willing to accept certain 'realities’ to ensure their place at the proverbial table remained a pristine space of individually apportioned, locally sourced food; a place where rhetorical restraint replaced actual political solutions to any given problem.

You chose 'safe’ over actual justice – meaning someone else’s kid will take a police bullet to the chest so that we can all read heavily redacted versions of Mark Twain in the peace and comfort of a colorful ball pit of higher learning like our own Frankfurt School, which I should mention was only made possible by a generous corporate donation from a multi-national purveyor of processed pork by-products with vaguely German origins. At the end of it, you’ll all be awarded a certificate declaring you free from venereal diseases, and the skills necessary to lower live poultry into a vat of ammonia in a subsidiary facility owned by our trustees. At your age, I was performing burlesque numbers on the mean streets of my Canadian homeland at the behest of my stage mother. But I’ll tell you all about that later in the term when we cover 'Hoochie-Coochie Cave Dancing of the Early Ottoman Empire - as Explained by a scantily-clad Miss Yvonne Waving a Jewel-Encrusted Saber’. Consider that your 'trigger warning’. Now let’s proceed:

It was enough that we embraced Caitlyn Jenner and applauded Meryl Streep giving the phone book version of the Gettysburg Address to her wealthy patrons – I could give a better soliloquy while swallowing a sword and balancing a cobra on my head, but I digress … It was enough to sprout a 'dad boner’ over Pussy Riot to declare ourselves – “punk rock”, even as we devised ways to make earth’s human and animal life redundant during brainstorming meetings that took place in an indoor ergonomic playground that served wheat grass martinis on tap. My dear friend Frederick Marcuse who took me under his bosom … or was that the other way around … argued that the technocratic efficiency of advanced, industrial societies had rendered it 'one-dimensional’, and as such, resistant to all critiques of it. Our “aversion to introspection” according to Adorno – another generous benefactor to the Frankfurt School – renders left-opposition to Trump little more than an elite-led, sour grape authoritarianism that is unable to contemplate its own role in a paradigmatic shift towards a more 'unprincipled’ and unpredictable variety of global aggression. If you don’t believe him, just ask a white feminist how writing 'rape culture’ on her boobs in sharpie will 'shame the patriarchy’, and this will give you some idea about why I start every afternoon coughing up a ball of mentholated phlegm into my cornflakes.

Let me tell you what brought us to this precise moment of imminent planetary collapse: It was “nice” people with library cards and rescue pets accepting the kind of compromises that result in bulldozing homes in the occupied territories of Palestine, imprisoning whistle blowers, putting indigenous land everywhere under threat, and even sodomizing a half dead Pan-African leader while he lay dying in a drainpipe.  

It’s the 'realists’ who sign off on nearly $40 billion in military 'aid’ to Israel so that it can build more settlements in defiance of International law, and the similarly counterproductive reasoning that blames Russian hackers for the DNC’s corrupt maneuvering to install its preferred Wall Street-friendly candidate in defiance of roughly half the voting population. The same folks who cry foul the loudest when an asshole takes his rightful place on the golden, Imperial throne after they have spent years polishing it for him, and expanding its powers to flush away civil liberties and environmental protections. Now all of a sudden that reclining, ermine-trimmed commode in the Oval Office is a “hot seat”. Back in the day when I was bumping and grinding on the Paramount lot for chump change, Charlton would grab me by the pussy and … well, never mind that now. Let’s just say that my jungle cat put up a fierce resistance that left a permanent scar on his manhood and not a single scratch on my lady mandibles.  Not sure where any of this is going, but anyhoo …

It’s the 'nice’ – meaning the technocratically-minded gatekeepers of the 'left’, who perform the linguistic feats necessary to justify, say, the involuntary sacrifice of dozens of dead Bedouin wedding celebrants in Yemen to maintain cordial relations with a despotic petrostate that helps prop up a neighboring Apartheid regime equally ill-disposed towards its benefactor. 'This is why we can’t have nice things like brutalist revolving restaurants atop Manhattan office towers’, they will remind you. Ingrates like you always second-guessing the stuff we do to prevent maniacs from seizing power here at home’. The nice among us, whom we used to call 'Good Germans’, prefer that you don’t bring 'false equivalency’ into reasoned discussion about state-sponsored murder, and focus on the positive … like … um … 'At least under Trump, my sad face selfies will have all the political urgency of Guernica’.  

It’s the “nice” that refused to hold Obama’s feet to the fire, giving him carte blanche to capitulate wholly to the more clamorous and opportunistic voices of his inner circle without ever troubling his conscience. The guy was so cool he could grant clemency to Chelsea Manning AND bomb a failed state into further oblivion all in the same week. “Nice” folks would never venture into the treacherous waters of condemning or even criticizing your country’s first black president for reasons entirely to do with the sort of career-minded, self-preservation that says “Bummer about Leonard Peltier, but Michelle Obama sure rawked that Zac Posen dress on the cover of Vogue!”

When someone *reaches across the aisle*, it’s usually to grasp at the last straws of power allotted to them by whichever democratically elected fascist regime happens to control Congress. Or it’s a hands-y director trying to cop a feel on a red-eye flight from LA. Yes, Otto Preminger, I’m talking to YOU!

To make a long-winded lecture only as long as it takes to dry one’s nails after the second coat of Revlon’s 'Dead Roses on a Dusky Tomb’: Trump didn’t win in spite of your 'reasoned’ acceptance of the outgoing president’s expanded powers, but because you were willing to rationalize its unsavory aspects long enough to ensure its unchecked and unbridled form reached its inevitable conclusion".

Professor De Carlo then flounced out of the lecture hall with the scent of Shalimar, and two or three shirtless Cabana boys trailing behind her discarded veils. “I’m off to powder my you know what. Class – and I mean the particular one that conflates legal weed smoking with political resistance - dismissed”!

by Jennifer Matsui

“How does it feel when you’re about to die?” asks a beady-eyed boy. His handgun, perpetually drawn at the hip, is leveled at a schoolteacher who’s bent over, tinkering with the innards of a car engine. This bit of cruelty foreshadows an impending violence—the big blast of silence. In fact, the threat of violence clings to this film with its oh-so-appropriate title, The Sadist (1963). And when the violence does come, it’s swift and blunt, and the threat looms once more. That’s how it feels when you’re watching this sweaty, greasy, and white-hot B movie that unfolds in real-time. Alamo Drafthouse programmer Joseph A. Ziemba describes The Sadist best: “If an episode of The Twilight Zone was directed by Tobe Hooper circa 1974, it might have turned out like this movie.” The film’s premise is simple, elemental even: Three teachers go on a road trip to watch a Dodgers game in L.A. Car troubles beset them, and they pull into a junkyard, finding a giggling serial killer and his girlfriend. The young sadist is dead set on murdering them only after making them squirm under his power.

Playing at drive-ins, and sharing an unfortunate double bill with Ray Dennis Steckler’s The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? (1964), The Sadist came and went like a Seattle rain. It’s an independent film produced by a man, Arch Hall Sr., who wanted to make his son, Arch Hall Jr., a movie star. Yet Jr. didn’t have a burning desire to be an actor at all. At the time, he had more of an interest in his own rock ‘n’ roll band, The Archers, and his Fender Jazzmaster, which can be seen with Jr. playing it in Eegah (1962) and Wild Guitar (1962). Later, he would become an airline pilot.  As for Hall Sr., he stumbled into show business after failed and aborted attempts in real estate, radio, and trucking operations. He financed quick, low-budget trash such as The Choppers (1961) and The Nasty Rabbit (1964), both of which starred Jr. The Sadist, on the other hand, is something altogether different, a nasty thriller amidst Sr.’s dreadful body of work. So it’s not surprising that he didn’t come up with the original idea, that would be the film’s director, James Landis. He brought a script loosely based on teenage serial killer Charlie Starkweather to Sr.’s attention. Sr. gave Landis the green light to direct the script with no real conditions except that Jr. had to star—and boy would he star.

Shot on a shoestring budget, The Sadist is a film, as Joe Dante observes in his Trailers From Hell review, like Casablanca (1942). It has a sweet mix of cast and crew. Along with Landis, there was cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, fresh from Hungary, and who would later lens Robert Altman, Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, and Michael Cimino’s films. Here, Zsigmond makes each shot dynamic. With his Arriflex camera, he shoots from different angles. Shots are set in the trunk of a car, as well as behind windows and fences. Richard Alden, Don Russell, and Helen Hovey comprise the trio of helpless teachers. They give competent performances. Marilyn Manning is Judy, the sadist’s mousy thrill-seeking girlfriend. And then there’s Jr. If he had no desire for acting, it doesn’t show in The Sadist. As Charlie Tibbs, he’s bold and extravagant. He’s convincing as a psychopath. He has the giggling, grinning appearance of Richard Widmark combined with the ultra-cool youth of James Dean.

A decade before, in the 1950s, Hollywood films about teenagers began to appear on the screen, films such as The Wild One (1953), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and Crime in the Streets (1956). In them, juvenile delinquents ran amok in the square world of adults. “You’re tearing me apart!” James Dean shouts as his parents bicker about him in Rebel without a Cause. That could be the mantra for all teens lashing out at authority figures. The Sadist, however, mutates the 1950s juvenile delinquent films. The teen kills the grownups; he tears them apart.     

by Tanner Tafelski      

My god, my god I never cease to be amazed and confounded by what a ridiculous world this has become. The depths people will plunge in order to solidify their pitiful victimhood. It grows more flabbergasting and absurd by the day.

I was just getting a handle on what “trans fats” were when they threw “transgender” at me. That took some more doing, considering all the legal repercussions and all the concessions businesses, schools, and prisons had to make to cater to this sudden explosion in the quasi-hemaphrodite population. Then people started bandying around the term “transracial,” and I still don’t know what the fuck that one means. Are they like wiggers or something? It all seems like so much whining foolishness. Worse it results in more controls on the language, those things we are and aren’t allowed to say out of fear of offending some useless delicate simpering snot. Because if you do offend them they’ll sue you into oblivion and make you go on an apology tour, as this is what we do now.

Until yesterday I was able to mostly just laugh off the nonsense and go back to listening to my Mentors records. Then yesterday I encountered the word “trans-abled” for the first time.

Okay, bear with me here if you already know the term (and if you do, and if you have ever used it earnestly in conversation, may God have pity on your soul.)

See, while “transgender” refers to people convinced they were born with the wrong genitalia given how they would prefer to have their genitals manipulated, “trans-abled” refers to people so desperate to be pitied, so desperate to be a victim they become obsessed with being a specific kind of cripple. Some will roll around in wheelchairs even though they’re perfectly capable of walking. Others will truss up their arms and legs like Lon Chaney in The Penalty to pretend to be amputees. Others with 20/20 vision will wear sunglasses and tap around with white canes. They claim, in myriad support group websites, that it’s just like being transgendered, in that they feel like they were born with the wrong body, that the defective bodies they pretend to have are how they were meant to live.

Yeah, they can tell themselves that all they want, but what it boils down to is they’re a bunch of pity whores who want to be treated special.

I thought it was bad enough to be living in a stupid world in which assholes are now allowed to bring their so-called “service animals” (mostly poodles and terriers and other pointless small dogs) into restaurants because some goddamn shrink told them they were suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome since mommy didn’t hug them enough when they were six. These “trans-abled” assholes are pushing it much, much further. A few with the courage of their stupid and misguided convictions are apparently taking steps to have themselves surgically altered in order to make their dreams of crippledom a reality. Most, however, seem content to remain cripple poseurs, to play act gimphood when it suits their fancy. But since this is America it’s now turned into a movement demanding they be treated the same way people with actual disabilities are treated. That means they want all those bonuses and perks that come along with being gimpy, like being able to go to the front of the line at Whole Foods, or parking in cripple spots at the mall simply because they enjoy pretending to be handicapped. Some apparently hang out with vets at paraplegic support groups and the like, sharing  their own imaginary stories about what their lives would be like as if they really were cripples or blindos or deafies.

There’s even a move on now (again because this is America) to legally declare “trans-ableism” a real honest-to-goodness mental malfunction, which would then allow these fakers to fulfill their dreams of not only having an actual victim label to slab on themselves, they’d also be able to collect disability payments.

Know what I think, as a blindo myself? I’m not personally offended by this on account of my own condition. To my mind there’s absolutely no difference between these poseurs and those geeks who go to comic book conventions dressed like Wonder Woman or Han Solo, or that sexual subbculture whose members dress like big stuffed animals. No, it’s that these fake cripples are demanding the rest of us take them seriously. I’m  pissed at all the seemingly endless levels of whininess constantly being unleashed upon the culture. If the laws are passed and the language further constricted to take these fucknuts seriously instead of just, y’know, pushing them down, what happens to the real cripples who have to be lumped together with the fakes?

First day I was teaching a couple years back, I was confronted with a line of students at my desk, each one holding an official piece of paper issued them by the school stating they had “a learning disability” and were therefore to be given separate tests, easier assignments, and more time than the other students to complete those assignments. My response at the time was “Well if you’re so goddamn stupid, why are you here? Why aren’t you in remedial classes or working in a mop factory like a normal retard instead of wasting everyone’s goddamn time with your fucking whining?”

(Of course I didn’t say that aloud, or I would’ve been arrested and convicted on hate crime charges. And don’t get me started again on “hate crimes.”)

Many years before that I was approached by a woman who claimed she was making a documentary film about blindos. “Oh,” she said in a wistful tone that made me want to stab her right there in my office,” it must be so wonderful to be blind! You’re living in a whole new, magical world!”

Realizing now that had the word been invented back then she would undoubtedly have called herself “trans-abled“ I wish I had stabbed her. No jury in the world would have convicted me. Hell, I might’ve even been given a prize for ridding the world of one more asshole.

I’m the first to admit that blindness doesn’t bother me that much. So long as I can work and get around I’m fine. It’s frustrating an annoying at times, but so are headcolds and hangnails. There’s nothing “wonderful” or “magical” about it, that’s for damn sure, but you learn to fucking deal with it or you become an insufferable pain in the ass.

I’m starting to  get the impression, from the research I’ve done, that these “trans-abled” morons actually begin with the impulse to be an insufferable pain in the ass, to be an unending constant burden on everyone around them, then set about figuring the best way to do that—a way no one could ever call them on. “Oh, you can’t yell at me! I’m in a wheelchair!”

So here’s what I think we should do. We should gather all the cripple poseurs together and give them exactly what they want. They want to be blindos, we pluck out their eyes. They want to be amputees we roll out the guillotine. They want to be paralyzed, we shoot them in the spine. Then we send them on their way and follow up about six months later to find out exactly how much fun they’re having with this wonderful new lifestyle of theirs. Was it real super fulfilling when they got lost in the West Village and no one would stop to give them directions? And hey, was it real magical when they had to ask their understanding spouses to  wipe their asses?

Then we tally up all their responses and shoot them in the head and dump them in the woods.

Whoops, could that be read as some kind of terrorist threat? Oh heaven forfend!

That would be ironic, wouldn’t it? If a real cripple had to do time in stir because a fake cripple was offended by him? Yet I can see it happening. Jesus christ what a pathetic world we’ve created.

by Jim Knipfel

A Dance to the Music of Time is one of the monuments of 20th-century British literature.

As a monument, it is immediate, cleanly chiseled, foursquare and, despite occasional intricate carvings of angels, stark. As a monument, it does not clearly disclose its sculptor – whether, in this case, it be the author, Anthony Powell, or its universal narrator, Nick Jenkins. And as a monument, at least for me, it is also less “to read” than “to have read.”

I wrote earlier here about the first two “Movements” of Dance (each Movement comprises three of Powell’s sequentially published novels). I entered the third Movement hoping that it might pry loose the hinge to the narrator, Nick Jenkins. War, after all, brings misery but most of all change. I was disappointed that nothing of the sort unfolds. The writing is excellent, incisive as always, but the content, especially considering the upheaval of World War II, is peculiarly insular and abstracted. The coincidences on which the the “dance” must necessarily depend seem more forced, less a natural interactive swirl.

Unlike in the first two movements, things do happen. Sort of. Jenkins experiences the deaths of friends and acquaintances, but if they have lasting emotional effect on him, he doesn’t (won’t?) express it. He serves at one or another military backwater that deals with nothing that impacts directly on the progress of the war. We seldom know precisely where he’s stationed (on the home grounds of England and – I think – Northern Ireland) or what his job or rank entails in practical terms, behind a scattershot of unexplained acronyms. (Perhaps this is a holdover from that odd spatial and temporal shyness in 19th-century English novels, which feared that exact placement of its characters would somehow embarrass the real realm. Better to have them live “during 18__ in _____.”)

Hitler and Germany receive one or two tangential mentions, but the enemy remains a nebulous something and the outcome of it all hardly a matter for thought. Jenkins’ personal life goes as unexplored as ever. He is married but seems unconcerned with his wife and child.

Socially inept megalomaniac Kenneth Widmerpool, the bizarre cement of those first movements, takes on a larger presence in his aggressive climb up the military ladder, but, to my mind, occupies a smaller – less pivotal – role here. By contrast, the addition of Pamela Flitton, a vituperative vamp who sleeps with almost anyone of importance (and many of none), introduces Powell’s most interesting and explosive female character. I missed the sense of humor that pervades the first two movements but seems in abeyance here.

The last Movement – which enfolds the final three novels – takes Jenkins into his 60s, a period when many of his contemporaries have died, either in the war or of a combination of mostly natural causes. It also expands on characters introduced during the wartime years, particularly the self-centered, beautiful, fearfully consuming Pamela. For continuing readers, it enduringly examines the slow rise and later rapid dissolution of Widmerpool. Though perhaps impossible within the limited confines of the “real” world, these two oppositely aligned but equally destructive forces marry and wreak havoc at every turn, their alliance within Dance necessary, perhaps inevitable.

A new, interwoven sub-cast includes novelist X. Trapnel, destroyed in part by Pamela; Trapnel’s biographer, the self-protective American Gwinnett; and young cult leader, Murtlock.

Such an outline may sound as though a great deal of action at last takes place, but actually, as in the rest of this 3,000-page opus, little is acted out onstage. The reports we hear, through Jenkins, range from mildly removed through emotionally distant to windblown supposition.

Stylistically and in its orchestration of events, Dance as a whole is close to perfection. Sentences slither and knot through themselves to come out the other end as straight lines of meaning. Present and past intertwine in Jenkins’ mind with remarkable clarity and cohesion. Characters introduced years in the past recur with enticing recollection. That’s not only difficult to do but, yes, monumental to achieve.

I haven’t read critiques of Powell’s work (I never do), but I think he was trying to tie together a definitive package of mid-20th-century England. If so, his success depends on how you define “England” in the social sense. If it’s a narrow slice of upper-middle-, lower-upper-class life, he’d done the job superbly (even if this slice today is mostly burnt toast). But if it’s the country’s society as an evolving whole, then hardly.

Though Jenkins interacts through the years with almost everyone he has ever known (the foundation of the “dance” concept), his waltzing partners, despite disparate backgrounds and modes of progress, can take on a narrow, claustrophobic quality. Where they step off the dance floor and have the temerity to die in the cloakrooms of, say, Japan during the war, they dissipate and cease to be “those who matter.”

Is this deliberate on Powell’s part? It unsettles me that I can’t say, that I can’t pin down the author’s overall intent. What did he have in mind by presenting both the war and Jenkins as enveloped in massive indifference? Which ties in to my biggest problem with the whole production: How are we to view Nick Jenkins?

He is embraced by one and all as a friend or trusted acquaintance, the one to whom you choose to impart the latest news, yet he does little but ask questions and absorb responses. He had two or three early love interests that turned out poorly, then married Isobel (who is allowed perhaps 40 lines of dialog over 12 volumes). He has two, possibly more off-camera children, one a girl (Caroline?) born during WWII, another a son (unnamed) who was interviewed by a university. A published author, he never discusses his books. In the military, by his rise in grade, he shows competence, so something of importance must reside inside him.

Does he stand in for Powell, or is he an objective-commentary mechanism? Is he presented as an uber-character who is peculiarly lacking in affect and empathy, or is he representative of an uncaring or at least undemonstrative social stratum? Is he all of these together? Or is he something else, a dissociated outcaste of the 20th century, at base unaware that he is dissociated or an outcaste?

Despite my general applause for, even amazement at this work, I don’t know who to recommend it to. An exquisite 19th-century verbal tapestry transposed to the 20th century, it should exist largely because it does. Any author who would undertake such a labor should be rewarded with recognition and careful consideration. But it’s not an easy read, not an enjoyable read, I’d guess, for most. It can seem an exercise in verbalism, a sort of literary isometrics. But once you’ve started, if you accept the scope and encompassment of it all, you will want to finish. Monumental, indeed.

by Derek Davis