Mature Themes (3 page)

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 Manhattan, 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.

The prime directive of fantasy is aftermath. In
A.I. Artificial Intelligence
, the world is covered in ice, above which an alien species excavates the image of our future together. Our life in remains, trinkets, Coney Island, all of it submerged in water memory. There is no future that isn't also an excavation of some present. In
A.I.
, aliens float past the twin towers of the World Trade Center. In the future, are they restored? If only Stanley Kubrick had lived to make his movie. He might have known that climactic precarity is an economics of gloom, predicated upon a system of consumption that, in our lives, became a hostility normalized in time. In my vision of the future, the resurrected Stanley Kubrick reshoots
A.I.
as a second parable of the contemporary moment. Since every science fiction is a reading of the period that produced it, the new movie ends with the robot boy discovering that his only job was to promote the male family member, hobbled by impotency, to his symbolic function as Father—and not to love and be loved in return. The boy is abstract wealth synthesized into a Haley Joel Osment-identified body, the cork in the void of loss. The aliens, who have come to earth to find us permanently lodged in the landscapes we made for ourselves, do not return him to the dream of family life in which the mother's love is the focal point of his experience; rather they return him to the dream of labor. His mother greets him, then goes into her bedroom and locks the door. Landscapes are an economics. Toil over the earth as we always have and eventually it will toil over you. Will we meet in our mutual fantasy? Will I finally be your employer?

I once lived in a house in upstate New York owned by the disinherited son of the publisher of
Penthouse
. In the winter, the snow used to freeze level with the porch, which was raised about a foot up from the yard, creating the illusion that you could walk off it onto solid ground. Once, a friend stepped off the ledge, forgetting that he wasn't walking out onto our yard, and fell forward and disappeared. In those days, winter was eternal. And I was the friend I'm telling you about.

In Los Angeles, I stayed with a friend who lived near a storage center for the Bureau of City Lights. When we walked to a nearby café, we passed by the fenced lot of the depot, which stretched an entire block. My friend suspected that it had been abandoned, but my friend is not always the most careful observer of his environment, so I couldn't be sure if this was true or not. I was struck by the huge array of lamps lying on the ground, a scene that felt like an incidental rejoinder to Chris Burden's
Urban Light
(2008) at LACMA. I read a news article recently about how LA is the city of the future because it is improving its mass-transit system. I think it is the city of the future because it takes the basic result of urban decline (i.e., decrepit infrastructure, abandoned buildings, deregulated public space) and uses it to propel itself forward. It plays its apocalyptic self-image against the plasticized glamour of Hollywood, producing a dissonance that one time gave me a panic attack while I walked through the public gardens in Pasadena with Kate Durbin. In this regard, one LA (there are many) seems to me designed as a science-fictional space, a patchwork of competing visions for how to structure our lives: into irrigated hills, domesticated flatlands, outer and inner social loops, transit brackets. In the future, the future will have ended, and the present will happen behind a velvet curtain in a nightclub at the bottom of Griffith Park.

In its comprehensive styling of known geography, Google Maps seeks the All only to find it cannot exist. Structured by the lack that a totalizing effort cannot contain, Google Maps is a matrix of fantasy and its correlatives, the between-space of representations of the real, altered and unaltered by Photoshop, a surveillance technology designed to render a fixed image of a changing field. In some time down the line, when certain landscapes erode beyond recognition, the most convincing evidence of their former existence will probably be Google Maps. I'm not a futurist except in this regard. Later, with a multitude of mapping technologies that will eventually render it obsolete, the original map will itself become a kernel of the real, distorting our perception of everything that we experience when we experience the so-called natural. Together we will watch the present unfold from afar. Glaciers, snowy mountains, fields: we will understand them only in terms of our seeing them represented online, consigned to the archive because their original, transitional form will have entered a delay between phenomenon and absence. I mean to say that these things are going away. Of course the bison we watch in northern Montana should graze free of our having to see them to know they had ever been there at all, but that isn't the case.

You are fugitive. I am reverie!

No mistake is made without permission first. At sea, I have been this, with you, thrown into the pile of things moving across us in rhizomatic bliss. Do you remember the early passage in Joe Brainard's
I Remember
where he describes throwing his glasses off the Staten Island Ferry? To reinforce blindness with behavior, I return to this moment so often because I have thrown my glasses into the harbor, too. Melancholy, even in its most cloudlike state, is never invisible to others; it is only ever abstracted to its absolute and most potent normalcy until it becomes the environment you exhaust yourself in. Like taking a train upstate midsummer to be by yourself and finding that the entire train is full of people doing the same thing. Pollution is extradition of the everyday, detritus scattered across the mechanisms that create daily life in the first place. Joe Brainard washed ashore of this landscape, among the floating nuances of newly depleted resources like love, kindness, memory. How many modes of production can we fit into this sentence? Disaster is tremendous and overwhelmingly narrow in its concern. Can you name it? And does its name stick?

I once saw the city of the dead in Robert Gardner's
Forest of Bliss
, an ethnographic film about the Hindu burial practices in Benares, India. The city of the dead is not only filled with the dead, it is filled with the living who arrange the ceremonies of the dead, laying them to rest in the Ganges strewn with flowers. I saw this film a long time ago and can no longer remember what the forest of bliss refers to. Perhaps it was ethnography, the central point of the film being its silence—lack of commentary—and therefore the redemption of the anthropologist in Western liberalism. Perhaps bliss is the post-ontological lack after death, things like personalities hovering over the void. I watched bodies get dumped into the river as professional mourners gathered to say goodbye. Today the forest of bliss is on fire. And though I am not dead, someday I will be the flowering death that burns down the temple paying homage to it. Light of the country beyond me, in monsoon time, perhaps the forest of bliss will be a film that plays its demise then turns to ash, which we will stuff in our mouths. My death will reach everyone who has met me, whether they remember me or not. And my death will walk across the plains to the city of the dead to meet me in the forest of bliss, and together we will cork the void that is this mysterious landscape it demands.

In black swan theory, the event that disproportionately redistributes the weight of our attention—scales on your eyes, etc.—is always within a range of predictable options for the present but is usually unavailable to thinking before the event occurs. The new philosophers will spend their last days locked in their cars. It shouldn't come as surprise. It should come in Kansas, the ripple in the wheat of an ideology made of recycled paper. It should come when we make plans to meet on Saturday for a drink but cancel because neither of us wants to bother meeting in real life. It is easier to text than to upend the present situation, despite its roving paradoxes. There are clouds in my windowless bedroom. If I mention semio-capitalism, what kind of poet does that make you? Doze at the sight of its flowering, wear what is available, wherever you find it. Mercenary delight has already invaded the next world and is finally pushing back into this one. These signs point to the future but to nothing else, and therefore what do they mean? That when I finally bought a mirror I smashed it within minutes? Palms freeze, the world is covered in ice, aliens come from space. The future is traveling furiously toward you at incredible speed and will beat you to your destination to surprise you by its resemblance to what you have already seen. This is how the world works itself into a groove. This is why I chartered a plane, piloted by aliens, to see the city covered in ice. It was, after all, just behind a curtain I could easily part.

SIGHING FROM ABOVE

One winter, I bought a Tamagotchi angel in a Chinatown market. The angel lived in a little plastic cloud made somewhere in an industrial zone in Southeast Asia, quite far from the Chinatown I found it in. There was a two-dimensional floor over which my two-dimensional angel floated in front of a dark star on a camouflage-green screen. It was made of seventy or so pixels that seldom changed except to animate a bounce, a smile or frown, or a teardrop over its forehead, which signified that it was sick and dying. It wore a flowing robe, like the angels of all the garage sale paintings my grandmother collects, and had a small halo and two wings. My angel moved around its inch by inch screen, hopping, shitting, and begging for angel food. I gave it a shot whenever it was sick (it was always sick). When the little teardrop appeared at the corner of its head, I had to toggle one of the three buttons on my plastic cloud to retrieve the shot. After I would administer the medicine, my angel would quickly be restored to good health, to holiness, and so the small imperfection of my universe—the declining health of my angel—was corrected until it shit on the floor once again, and I had to clean it up using a separate but similarly enacted function.

After a few weeks, I started to think my angel had mixed feelings about being my angel despite my faithful attention to its every need. I had mixed feelings about it too, especially as my life became increasingly consumed with its care. I began to feel that my days feeding and tending to such a simple computer program of so few actions (sleep, eat, shit, get sick, die) were being wasted. If computers don't eat, why should a Tamagotchi? Moreover, I wasn't sure this was “appropriate behavior” for an adult. I had supposed at the time that it was a theological question, what's appropriate with regard to interfacing with angels, and therefore beyond me. I had very little knowledge of religion, but what I did know made me uncomfortable. An angel, made of light much like mine was made of light, led the only credible insurrection against the Christian God, until he too shit in his plastic cloud and was hurled into the underworld. Perhaps my Tamagotchi was a little underworld unto itself and my angel was actually the latest incarnation of Satan, our most famous herald of the Lord. I wondered if my tedium was some contrapasso earned in a life before a death I'd forgotten I'd suffered. The crude but nevertheless spitting image of an angel, the angel of darkness, the inverse of his earlier life in the upper echelon, the silver jet of a totalizing, incomprehensible power that hangs above us, like the sun, obtained in a plastic egg I kept in my pocket.

A few weeks after I got my angel, I rode the J train to a friend's apartment in Bushwick for dinner. It was the end of spring but the temperatures still hovered in the mid-fifties. In this refrigerated May, my Tamagotchi angel's behavior slowed down to a crawl, punctured only occasionally by shouts for food, for a shot, for a cleaning after it messed on its screen. My heater was broken so when my friend invited me over to dinner I figured this was the perfect opportunity to warm my angel up.

Angels eat so fast—nothing is ever enough. No matter how filling the meal might be, however complex (think about food as necessary fuel on the molecular level—but also as metaphysical splendor, food for the sempiternal kingdom arisen over us), it is never enough.

We watched the Food Network “for inspiration” while we cooked. Guy Fieri gnawed on the charred leg of a hog at a Texas BBQ. The meat industry is relentlessly excluded from our experience of its service: Guy doesn't show where the pig sleeps, but we can assume the machine isn't gentle when it handles her. My favorite chef, Gordon Ramsay, once said that someday restaurants will only sell atmosphere. In a reversal of his prediction, now that atmosphere is food. As a subject a hog is not atmospheric; in fact its presence is so excessively physical that it must be hidden from our experience of its flesh. Fieri renders it such in the theatrics of his consumption: the largesse of its death becomes a tribute to the life it gives, excessively, in the mouth of Guy. I stared at the TV while my friend tenderized the beef with a hammer.

I think you could fit this moment into a poem by Evan Kennedy, though he would likely reshape it into a wholly different poetics out of which one city might be posited against the backdrop of another, encircled in angels like wireless internet, the one I most want to live in, a kind of San Francisco of the sky. I am the most social animal in this city, I go from apartment to apartment for dinner and drinks, for sleeping around, for communing with the saints. But not to digress, there's this poem by Evan that I found online in which he writes,

I suddenly felt myself among those beasts, there in that unencumbered logic of dreams, years back at the Best Western in Savannah, Georgia, where I hid away for a long time and spent my nights and days listening to La Monte Young recordings and an audio file of Alice Notley reading “At Night the States” on repeat. In Savannah, I watched a lot of Gordon Ramsay, too. I thought about this gilded cult to which he belonged: the hovering system that coordinates the sexless angels whose lack of an anus indicates they don't eat, yet the presence of mouths, which I suppose are their right only as enunciation, all made of light anyway so what does it matter, suggests we might put a hamburger there and see what happens. I'm betting I'll make their heaven my home, some gold-leafed atopia linked by tramway back down to earth, below us the size of a blue M&M lost in black cloth. Do Tamagotchi angels have stomachs? I asked my Tamagotchi angel. I put my hand on my own to feel the movement within and confirm that I was still alive.

At the Best Western, the same where Paula Deen ran her first restaurant, The Bag Lady, I spent my afternoons sitting in a dark room, watching the TV glow with Food Network personalities at the center of the room. The living faces of America's top chefs smiled, hovered there, and I searched their expressions for signs of my own coming transcendence, for reconciliation with this tearful world. It was like going to church. The smell of Paula's fried chicken, then unknown to the rest of the country, wafted up from the kitchen below, and I often went to bed dizzy with hunger, the TV humming in the background.

There's a moment in the Oprah special on Paula Deen where Paula and her sons discuss the restorative effect of psychoanalysis. After pausing to praise Paula's angelic fried green tomatoes and sing to God, Oprah asks her to describe the schism that erupted between her and her sons before she became one of America's most beloved chefs. When she started The Bag Lady at the Best Western, Paula had recently separated from her husband and was seeing a married man. This infidelity, such radical divergence from the ethics of a Christian like Paula (born again or later, of course, and reframed as the necessary departure from the path to God in order to find it again), formed a terrible division between Paula and Son A, another chef, and Son B, the manager of the front of the house. To repair the situation, they went to family counseling, which forced them to confront the problem as one of positioning. The therapist asked Son A to kneel before Paula and Son B to look away, out the window, his back turned to the scene. The therapist then ordered them to accept one another as necessary to each other's happiness and to their financial success. The family immediately broke down in tears, left the therapy session, and was no longer sundered by Paula's destructive behavior. Together again, they never went back.

“How did this solve the problem?” Oprah asked.

The family positioning in the therapy session demands we read it in strictly Lacanian terms, substituting Lacan's famous triad of reality and our perception of it for each family member, the family itself being a patient of this analysis, Paula explained. In this session, Paula represented the Real, the entirely constitutive but impossible to perceive truth that the family cannot see directly, or else it would explode in such close proximity to its inflexible horror. Son A, supplicant at his mother's feet, represented the Imaginary, that is, the component of the psyche that orients itself to the Real but which cannot look at it directly and therefore generates out of this terrifying knowledge the engine of imagination that allows us to cope with, and interpret, its presence in our lives. Paula did not look at him because he could not look at her—to do so would have annihilated the patient. Son B, lonely at the window overlooking the desolate parking lot of the therapist's suburban office, represented the Symbolic, the part of the triad that acknowledges the rules under which the other two are understood as components drawn together and united with him. Son B's pragmatic function as manager offers the consent to the law the family unit must give, despite the rough going of the back of the house and the inherent instability of the subject. In a sense, the Best Western was the Big Other, the symbolic order, through which all of this perceives itself as itself, rotating within its formative vortex that both lies at the center of all things and is all things. In the explicit structuring of the family as a single mind, the therapist resolved the competitive problem by forcing them to play the roles of the psyche that dominated each of them but which each struggled to master. I'll stay with these beasts, you might say, I'll eat forever until everything is made right.

Laughing, Paula told Oprah, “We knew we never wanted to go back!”

On my TV, Gordon Ramsay shouted at a woman who owns an unsuccessful Italian restaurant in Tucson. He showed her a thing or two about running a small business and about food, violently shoving the chef whose incompetence was the root of the restaurant's problems. Gordon is famous the world over, constellated among a curious society of individuals whose celebrity is predicated on a mastery of other people's desire to watch what they might consume without being able to do so. You might call them saints, carrying the desired world within them, disciplined into fame by its power. This network includes the illuminated kitchens of everyone's dreams, little churches and their patrons administered by saints of a demimonde. Magicians of flour and flesh, architects of houses of cake and honey drenched in crème and lemon filling. Gordon Ramsay said to the woman sobbing in her kitchen, “The beautiful is that which we do not wish to eat.” She had just tasted her restaurant's lasagna and, sobbing, could not take a second bite.

After dinner, my Tamagotchi angel vibrated in my pocket because it was hungry. This was the fifth or sixth time it had done so in three days. I pulled it out and looked at its distressed, pixelated face, squared by a universe wired to hunger and a desire for my attention. “Please feed me,” my angel chirped. After the feast we'd just had I thought it would be full for life, but apparently not. The angel Guy Fieri's fried ice cream left it only craving more. My angel continued to bounce up and down; its wings molted and folded behind its back. Long, silken feathers littered the bottom of the screen where it rested in a final malaise. I suggested to my angel that it eat and satisfy itself with the meat of Christ, but my angel shook its head and said, “It isn't enough.” Around me, Chinatown froze at the still point of summer, the air held quietly over us, submerged in the complimentary aromas of duck, dried fish, roasted chicken, and pork buns, a disassembling zone of modes of commodity exchange amid weird silence. It was too hot to speak.