Mature Themes (2 page)
Authors: Andrew Durbin
SMILE
ON A JET
going west, I look down from my Delta flight to California below, territory of the imaginary in which clouds ring out utopias of the golden earth, rivers of milk, rivers of excess that flow to Justin Bieber's “Baby,” ringleader of the virgins encased in his remote adulthood, he wears chastity like a veil to reinforce tween sex appeal, which of course would be violated were you to touch him, oh oh oh I cannot die I cannot be killed I can only fly across the surface of the continent below, landscapes of undying splendor and adoring peoples who shuffle en masse to see me, everywhere, at once, hemorrhaging category of the straight male, starstruck by the excess of disruptive totalities, bodies in a gym or smiling on a jet, out of which, oof, their structuring comes in a wave, or as Paul Virilio writes in
The Information Bomb
, “the smaller the world becomes as a result of the relativistic effect of telecommunications,” meaning Justin Bieber's Instagram, “the more violently situations are concertinaed, with the risk of economic and social crash that would merely be the extension of the visual crash of this âmarket of the visible,' in which the
virtual bubble
of the (interconnected) financial markets is never anything other than the inevitable consequence of the
visual bubble
of a politics that has become
panoptical
and
cybernetic
,” i.e., in bringing it all together, the net of disarrayed particulars finally bucks the subjective field in which a holographic Bieber moves, ensconced in his private jet, or more to the point, the murder plot unravels but ends to reverse expectation and defers death across the event horizon, into evening, where the oldest man with a Justin Bieber tattoo meets co-conspirator to finalize his plan to castrate and murder the pop star, in a bunker where we regroup to arrange powers of attorney, flowers climbing up the walls, my fingers close around the rail as I deplane at SFO, which is not difficult though with an eye on the long view it might become impossible, submerged in fog, going about for days, until I reach my advanced age, in and out of feeling and deciding that, truly, the most beautiful place-name in the United States is
Embarcadero
, Spanish for wharf, a place of departure, I remember renting a van and driving around San Francisco at night, powerful force of country music registering within its coordinates the activity of memory, the split second at which I enjoyed seeing the word
Divisadaro
on a sign, wondering what exactly Justin Bieber will remember of his travels, his name which I almost wrote here as
Justine
, like the character in the famous porno fantasy of the Marquis de Sade, prisoner of unsplit will, masculinity reinscribed in the supple dictator's body around which non-male-assigned bodies cavort until twisted into the chain-link fence that surrounds him, the Marquis, writing on toilet paper, Justine Bieber writing on his iPhone, a hundred wonders that ought to be forgotten but not the alleged nude photos that prevail online and his balls at the tip of a knife, such a different implosion of particulars that makes up a night in San Francisco vs. a night at the Kids' Choice Awards, onstage, splashed by slime as is Nickelodeon's custom, and to think, even green goo, the texture of semen, became a corporate signifier, Justine, Justine, I want to call out as I watch him drenched in neon DNA, the purple sky above me untouched by the fog of the bay, so atypical I suppose, but everything is not misfortune and with enough drive the speed to escape this vantage point of the unholy world is enough to propel you beyond, into the nonspace of air travel, globalized bodies of pop stardom, Thérèse beset by misfortune, brought to the mud to make it holy again, the Madame de Lorsagne clearing Thérèse of any crime until she is struck, not by lightning but by the moralistic literary device of a culture about to be wiped off the map, I'm not criticizing de Sade I'm only suggesting this might be his critique, so I head up north to the Redwoods, where, by the end of the twentieth century, 95% of the forest was sawed down to furnish us with a forest of the dead, a ghost wood, the encompassing home of the lost brought together by the crisp air of another day, my feet placed firmly on the spongy earth, I walk with a friend to a tree where many people photograph themselves, likely the most photographed tree in the park, into which I carve Justine, name of our roseate exegesis and a totem, worthy of violation of the law to be written into one of the members of the 5% as permanent fixture, the lonely forest, the place I wish I knew best, which I cannot pass through with the speed necessary to forget it was ever such a roaming territory, endless once, a world of giants in which the living prevailed alone among the branches
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 â¦
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 âwin 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 flaÌneuse 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. AntiflaÌneuse, 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, easierâa 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”âWallace Shawnâ“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, sudden 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 fraterniteÌ
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 lameÌ
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
antiflaÌneur or -flaÌneuse 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