I figured I should do something for Halloween for work, but I’m really fucking lazy, you see? I bought some SFX makeup online, and thanks to my gothy past, it took me about 20 minutes to do this makeup. I have no idea what the fuck it is supposed to be. I wanted a bloody scar, and just look undead. Well here it is.
I don’t know why I like Russian literature. Maybe it’s the difficulty? Maybe I like the challenge of their length?
I have no idea how I found out about Andrey Platanov’s Chevengur. I think it was said in passing by a “Booktuber,” but I really can’t find the reference. All I know is that when I heard about it I added it to my wishlist on Bookshop.org.
This is a romp through the steppes of Russia just post-revolution after the Red Army defeated the White Army. It starts with a look at the lives of the most destitute before we go on a Don Quixote-esque journey through Russia and a scathing satire on early-Soviet era communism, or a scathing satire on capitalism, or a scathing satire on peasants. I really couldn’t decide.
The first half of the novel was a lot easier to read than the second half, where we meet Alexander Dvanov as a child and all of his struggles which he overcomes before being given the directive to look for communism among the steppes. As he’s going from town to town, the narrative is brisk. But Platanov still finds room for some commentary. In one town “as for their duties, these had been retitled so as to demonstrate greater respect for labor (p. 155).” Although, to be fair to the communists, it really is something stupid that our capitalist culture continues to do. In one of these towns, Dvanov and his wandering knight of communism friend Stepan Kopionkin tells the commune to complicate things. “’When everything is confined, complicated, and incomprehensible,’ he went on, ‘then there will be work aplenty for the honest mind, while miscellaneous elements will be unable to squeeze through the narrow bottlenecks of complexity.’ (p. 157.)” Complication for complication’s sake. How fucking stupid. Perhaps this is why the novel was banned in the Soviet Union until the late 1980s.
Once we get to Chevengur, that’s when the narrative grinds to a halt. Characters get reintroduced, such as Alexander’s half-brother Prokofiy. We stay in the city where they violently expelled and eradicated the bourgeoise, where they moved buildings to be closer to one another, where they gave up work and allowed the sun to do all the work for them, where any work that was done had no practical purpose. It’s all just really odd.
So in the final pages when the Cossacks come, annihilate the city leaving Alexander as one of the few survivors to travel back to the lake his father killed himself in to reunite with his father. In a snap, this whole seeming absurd utopia was destroyed.
This was probably the most difficult of the Russians I’ve read so far, but it was interesting to read about the early Soviet era from the late 1910s to early 1920s. Not as many hardons as with Tim and Pete, but still intriguing nonetheless.
I’m really fucking tired of sad queer shit. I’m tired of the boo hoo bullshit of Andre Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room or E.M. Forster’s Maurice. I guess they do have their time and place, but I really hate that people think that this is the extent of queer male literature. Are anger and rage not valid emotions?
And that’s the thing with James Robert Baker’s novel Tim and Pete. He was fucking pissed off at society for letting AIDS kill millions of us and leaving the rest of us living in fear. This was scorched-earth anger at republicans, at straight people, at the world, something I think we can use a little of right now.
Set on Labor Day weekend in 1993 in Southern California, we start out with Tim, a film archivist, going on a date-gone-wrong down to Laguna Beach before happening to run into his recent ex Pete, local rockstar, who just happened to have just moved to Laguna. Both approaching 40 soon, they have their own Odyssey through the Southland from beating an ultraconservative congressman to a bloody pulp, to hitchhiking through the burnt remains of South Central post-Riots, to hunting for one of Pete’s sponsorees Joey from Long Beach to Valencia where he has found himself with a gang of queer anarchist art fags who plan on terrorism to kill Reagan.
Okay, maybe this won’t make a nice Oscar-bait film making a star out of waif pedo-bait actor. And it doesn’t set up for a straight white hero to swoop in and help solve all of the helpless fags’ problems. This is a we-don’t-trust-you-fucking-breeders-and-we-want-to-send-a-fucking-message-you’ll-remember thing. As the art fag gang leader Glenn said, “This is payback. An object lesson. That not all queers are going to mince off to the hospice or be content to carry signs and blow whistles.” (p. 213)
It also calls out the gay community which I still think is pertinent today. “Most gay men are suck-ups,” Pete said. “They’re still into playing victim and martyr which is what people want to see. Be a good little faggot and mince on off to the hospice and pay the price for your sins.” (p. 143) While we’re not mincing off to hospices anymore, there’s still that collective desire to be acceptable and fit into straight culture, to be “what people want to see.” Maybe it’s a generational thing, but I’ve never had a desire to fit into anything. I’m a proud goth faggot atheist. I don’t want to be acceptable to anyone. I don’t want to be tied down in heteronormative structures like “marriage.” I am not like you. I am not like a straight person. The thought of normalcy is the biggest horror in my life.
But this is hardly a one-dimensional novel. It also deals with the issue of respectability vs. authenticity — when does the rage cross the line from a justified crime to unwarranted? How is Pete’s beating up a homophobic congressman after catching him fucking his mom in his office more justified than the art fag gang’s plan? As Pete said as they were driving through South Central ruminating about the Riots, “I wish they’d aimed their rage better though. Instead of burning themselves out, and burning down Koreatown, they should’ve gone after Daryl Gates. They should’ve gone out to Simi Valley and burned down the courthouse. And the Reagan Library. With the Reagans in it.” (p. 79)
I discovered this book in the early 2000s, years after Baker’s suicide in 1997. I had discovered his posthumously published novel Testosterone first (which was subsequently made into a really fucking awful film in 2003 starring Antonio Sabato Jr. and Christopher from Gilmore Girls.) While I loved all of Baker’s other novels, Tim and Pete is the only one that stuck with me, the only one that I’ve revisited multiple times. When I’m in a funk, Tim and Pete is my wasabi, my palate cleanser. I can now go on other things. I think the fact that Tim spends most of the novel in a Butthole Surfers tee helps keep me at least semi-erect while reading.
And who can object to a little hardon while reading?
A couple of weird dreams.
1
Some generic hair metal rocker with jet black hair while still in his prime was driving me around in his convertible around country roads. It could be Tommy Lee or Richie Sambora. Whomever it was, we were just riding around, flirting with each other, having the time of our lives while speeding down these two-lane roads in the middle of nowhere.
We park at a country store, and inside there are rows of picnic benches. We sit facing each other as he morphs into Demi Moore. You see, we need to avoid getting gay bashed. Fine.
I lean in and start kissing Demi. Soon my mouth reaches her vagina where I start to tease her clit. A sound stirs me, and I walk towards the back of the room where I run into Pamela Anderson and proceed to do the same thing.
I apparently am really bad giving women head because there really wasn’t any reaction to my efforts. So I walk out and get back into the car with Generic Hair Metal Rocker.
2
I’m back at Disney going through the nightmare transition where I was scapegoated for Disney’s shitty AP transition implementation. I’m being even bitchier and angrier than I actually was during that time, lashing out at everyone around me. More than remembering the details of the dream, I remember the feeling, the anger and frustration I felt throughout this time which led to me actively looking to leave in 2023.
I’ve got to say that I’m really happy where I’m at right now. Even though I think I’m doing more than my title, I just got my cost-of-living raise, so I’m good. They treat me right, and I can afford to live which is what matters to me the most.
The more I think about my life, the more of a loser I realize I am. There might be a tinge of regret of not making different decisions, of ultimately taking the safe path in life. But we’re told that regrets are for losers. (Things are getting quite circular here.) Nevertheless the inner gothpunkrebel of my teenage years would spit on my face now seeing how ultimately petit-bourgeois I have become.
Reading Rob Doyle’s biofiction Threshold from 2020 was a slap in the face. It is parts autobiography, philosophy, travel chronicles, drug stories and a catalog of self-disgust. It is all things that are in my wheel house which made me really enjoy it. But as immersed as I was reading his fictionalized (?) adventures through Europe, Southeast Asia, India in various stages of sobriety and debauchery, I always wondered what would have happened if I said fuck you to the States in my 20s and went to Europe, if I actively lived the life of an artist/writer/performer that I always imagined I would be. Well, you see what sewage spiral this sent me down.
The values I lived by stemmed in part from the conviction, attained at the age of sixteen and never really discarded, that work, as it was generally experienced by people of my own working-class background — i.e. dreary toil that you didn’t really believe in — was to be avoided as far as possible. (118)
My ethos was never as strong as my desire for comforts in life. What the fuck is the use of ethos when you’re trying to scrape by trying to survive on the streets? At the same time, who the fuck are you if you keep selling yourself out? This is the internal struggle I’ve dealt with ever since I left home for college at 18 in 1997. And while I’ve dipped my toes in debauchery, there was never a point I was lost in it where I couldn’t come back to safety.
I’m not saying that if I made different decisions that I would be a successful writer/artist/performer — actually I’m really implying that I would probably died on the streets had I done so. But who knows?
Later in this passage on page 118 as he describes his early-life gravitation to Georges Bataille and how Bataille justified it all: [Bataille] argued that human beings had lost themselves in the work-world, rendering themselves means rather than ends. The systems of rationality and order we had erected to protect us from the dangers of nature had grown too rigid and powerful: they now enslaved rather than served us. (118)
Amen.
Of course the 313 pages aren’t all focused on Bataille and hedonism — this was just the part that got me thinking the most. But there are quite a bit of psychedelics and sex, two of my favorite things in life that I don’t think I’ve indulged in enough. Boredom and death. Humor and thought. At documenta, an art festival that takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany, he writes: but this institutional yoking of art to political engagement seemed symptomatic of a broader cultural synergy: everywhere you looked, art was becoming indistinguishable from social work, progressive politics, liberal guilt. (154) The deeper we get into the quagmire that is the 2024 US presidential election, the more I feel this.
I bought my copy via Thriftbooks, and a “withdrawn” hardback copy from the Appleton, WI Public Library came to me. When you open the cover, the word “WITHDRAWN” in all caps is stamped on the page. It made me wonder why. The book was in perfect condition, so was it withdrawn because no one checked it out? That’s a very depressing thought since I really liked this book. Was it withdrawn because of the subject matter? I know how precious people are about words other people read, so maybe that was it? If so, it’s a little more thrilling. Again, at documenta: …yet the earnest patter that followed about human rights, democracy and the struggle for justice has me siding with the tyrants and the conflagrationists. Besides, censoring authors gave them the prestige of rock gods. When a book was deemed heretical enough to immolate… it gained the impregnable glamour of revolt and edginess (though perhaps this did not apply to Winnie-the-Pooh (152.)
So maybe this is the case and Rob Doyle is now a rock star? At least he can be in Appleton, WI?
Meanwhile I’ll go back to work.
As I was going through my illness last month, my 2013 Honda Accord endured a milestone:
My car has reached 100,000 miles. When I got the car in September 2016 it was only at 23k. Almost 8 years later here we are. I honestly would have gotten to 100k quicker had it not been for the pandemic.
Sure she’s taken me to Vancouver, Montana, Louisiana (twice) and Vegas numerous times. I threw up in her on my way to work years ago after a night of heavy drinking. Aside from a couple of bumper kisses and an incident with a druggie homeless cyclist running a red light, I’ve not been in an accident. I’ve also never gotten a ticket in her. But I’ve also never fucked in her — I’m not a teenager after all.
Since she’s a Honda Accord, she’ll probably last me at least another 100k.
The last time I was seriously sick was in November 2019. I was in Brussels and had the flu. This was less than optimal since I has just four days into a two-week Europe trip and had just been through Copenhagen and Amsterdam. Fortunately I had an Airbnb, so on my only full day in the city I just let the fever and chills and fatigue do their worse to me with no interference from housekeeping or anything else. Somehow I felt good enough to continue my journey to Paris the next day and go on with my vacation.
One of the best things about the pandemic was staying home and avoiding everyone’s cooties. Even after we started getting back to normal, I managed to avoid everyone’s cooties. So aside from my reaction to the Covid jabs, I had not been sick in the ensuing years. Until last month.
The first weekend last month I was in Vegas with two of my aunts (who were celebrating birthdays) and my cousin Gina. I was the driver, the only reason I was invited, so we rented a giant fucking Expedition and had a good weekend at Resorts World. We got back Monday, and it was when I was at work on Tuesday that I felt a cough. Fuck. I knew I was sick. The rest of the week was me trying to work from home but just being too fatigued to do anything. I had a real bad cough, and for a couple of days I had a fever and chills. By the end of the next week, I barely started feeling better to go back to work, but I was still coughing away. In fact I still have this lingering cough.
But man, this knocked me on my ass for a couple of weeks. The expired at-home Covid tests said I didn’t have Covid, but who knows? Maybe I finally got Covid? It felt more like a traditional flu. I made sure to mask up so I didn’t spread it to anyone, so I did my part to nip it in the bud.
Moral of the story: don’t get this flu. Just don’t.
I happened to see MVTANT back at the Substance 2022 festival. It was after Jesus and Mary Chain finished their set on the main stage, so I decided to explore the other stages in the Los Angeles Theater. There Joseph Anger was in the mezzanine stage, and I was mesmerized. I wanted to stay longer, but Kanga was scheduled to play downstairs in the ballroom.
The energy he exhibited live belied the tempo and the beat of his music. If the performance was on mute, I would have expected the music to have a really aggressive tempo like Atari Teenage Riot rather than the EBM throwback it was. Once home when I listened to MVTANT, I had to go on YouTube to see the live performance because what was in my memory versus what I was hearing didn’t match up.
MVTANT just released his first proper album Electronic Body Horror this month, almost 40 minutes of EBM horror that made my scarred psyche feel comforted. I don’t know whether it was how much the opener “Disintegration” sounded like a guitar-less Burn-era Sister Machine Gun or “In Dreams” had a “Dig It” style beat. Or the samples on “Trauma Bond” that chugs along leading us to what I assume is an abattoir. And I might be high but I think he might have sampled Mu’s “Paris Hilton” to begin “Pretty Flesh.” But I felt comfort in the horror.
There is nothing manic about the songs. They just propel you closer and closer to this nightmare, not so much a chthonian creature as it’s a scenario, like you are escaping a murderer and make it home to your family but the murderer slashes you up anyway. It’s horrible, yes, but at least you can dance.
As much as I love this album and have not been able to stop playing it, I do wonder whether it is good for me or for the world in general. I really fear living in the past, romanticizing everything about the “good ole days” and not evolving. Fuck stagnation and boredom.
We just had the Cruel World festival where Duran Duran headlined with also featured Blondie, Adam Ant, Ministry playing their first two albums from the early to mid 80s, Gary Numan, Soft Cell. You get my drift. I guess Interpol were there, but they are about 20 years (aka one generation) removed from their hey day, and they were a nostalgia band to begin with anyhow. I just fear we are crossing the line from appreciating the past to living in the past.
Then I take a look at what I’m listening to. Here are the top 10 artists I’ve scrobbled this year:
Besides MVTANT and Filmmaker, that doesn’t look very current, does it?
I get it. I’m getting older, and your musical tastes tend to cement during your adolescence and early adulthood. I’m grateful that there was enough challenging music during those times so that I wouldn’t be so blindsided as to think that Taylor Swift’s music was great.
Maybe that is my horror that this album is driving me towards, that I’ll be meme of Abe Simpson yelling at a cloud. Fuck.
But at least he’s cute.
This death pissed me off. I’m still fucking angry about it. Steve Albini was only 16 years older than me. There is no reason his fucking ass should have died of a heart attack. None.
This was a guy who clung onto his principles, was outspoken about them and never wavered. He once said that pop music was for children and idiots. So he hurt some feelings along the way. Our generation never had any to begin with anyway.
I loved his bands Big Black, Rapeman and Shellac. I loved the records he helped engineer: PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me, The Breeders’ Pod, Slint’s Tweez, Ut’s Griller, Jesus Lizard’s Head, Nirvana’s In Utero, Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s Yanqui U.X.O. And there are probably a lot more where he was uncredited.
I first saw him live with Shellac back on Super Bowl Sunday January 28, 2001 with Fatkid. A bunch of us were going to go down to Disneyland to take advantage of the short lines due to the Super Bowl (which was false false false.) But Fatkid and I got wind that Shellac were going to play a morning show at the Knitting Factory. We got tickets to that show and ended up meeting everyone else down in Disney. To date, this was the only show where there were Krispy Kreme donuts for all to partake (I remember the donuts being free, but I could be wrong.)
I need to keep remembering that there is a way to live without succumbing to the evils of banal capitalism, to demand excellence and to not settle for whatever is popular. And fuck Steely Dan.
I really didn’t intend to marathon drive, but it was my only choice since I only had two days to make it from LA to Missouri. It wasn’t too bad, really. The fact that it is around 780 miles from here to Albuquerque, NM and another 830 miles to Springfield, MO does sound daunting. But I had rented a 2023 Infiniti Q50, had cruise control on for most of the way, had my tunes on. I never got sleepy or fatigued on this over 4,000-mile road trip. And since I really only ate once a day since I was sitting down most the day, there weren’t a lot of stops that needed to be made: just gas stops (where I also bought water), and pee breaks here and there.
This trip brought me to Missouri and Arkansas for the first time. This leaves Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa as the only states west of the Mississippi River I have yet to travel to.
Here are some thoughts I had while on this trip:
It’s been a while since I did a long road trip like this, so it was nice to see the states again. Now to go to the final states I have left…
