I'm a-gettin' steamed!

Essays these days.

They're so pipsqueak. They lack spirit, imagination, and flair. They're so comfortably cocooned inside a Paris-to-New York milieu of mincing trope, namedropping erudition, and goes-without-saying self-importance.  Also thematic banality -- writing stuff just to be writing stuff. 

A proper essay thinks by the seat of its freakin' pants. It goes somewhere unexpected. It makes your reading brain blink, astounded by paragraphs happening as prose art. 

An essay should vibrate with originality. An audacious essay is, oddly, an act of humility: a willingness to appear somewhat nuts in the compulsion to explore dubious territory by relying on sheer wits.

Thomas De Quincey wrote real essays:

Thomas De Quincey essays

Charlie Kelly versus World Order

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Charlie Day as Charlie Kelly 

First, let's stipulate that everyone is unusual. The spectrum runs from highly functional people with a few quirks to stark raving madmen and madwomen. Then, there's Charlie Kelly. He has completely sidestepped the spectrum.

Objects have meanings bestowed on them owing to consensus of experience. A hammer is for affixing a nail. A window is for staring out of. A pizza is for being round. So on and so forth. But in Charlie's head, all objects are free-floating, a-historical phenomena.

As with objects also with behavioral conventions. Every social construct is, for Charlie, a region of stupefaction and always already beside the point. His impatience with the usual, the agreed-upon-by-society expresses itself as an almost physical spazzification.

Try to imagine Charlie Kelly running for elected office, becoming an entrepreneur, writing depressive poetry. It's not possible. Outsider artists interred in insane asylums would consider Charlie one step beyond. This fracture of normality precludes his participation in ordinary non-verbal codes. Inflections, nuances, winks, and nods don't mean for Charlie what they mean for the rest of us. This is not solipsism on his part. This is about him moving around as best he can inside our collective solipsism.

Charlie is preternaturally tuned in to a frequency of "I wasn't consulted beforehand about being born, therefore...rabbit." This is non sequitur as the manic law frothing beneath all philosophies of Being and Time.

Charlie Kelly is the embodiment of something on the tip of the tongue. He's the living reverse of the Freudian Uncanny -- with Charlie, things have no chance of ever coalescing into the familiar. Charlie is permanently un-housed.

Watching Charlie Kelly on the TV series It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is to encounter primal spirit set loose in the world. He's a stray mercurial juggler of semantics performing unlawfully inside our thick categories.

"Under the Boardwalk"

This song goes out to my friend KB.

some Ravel piano music

colors from somewhere else

I think I've read that color has to do, scientifically, with light. Something about a prism and the word "spectrum." I really can't be bothered with that kind of thinking. It makes me tense and rebellious. I prefer rummaging around in the fractal cracks and seams of things, where spirit moves and the poetic happens.

I want to talk about Jack Cardiff's use of Technicolor in the 1947 Powell and Pressburger film Black Narcissus. 

I bought the DVD several years ago, owing to Cardiff's color. It's the most beautiful film I've ever seen. The plot and characters are beside the point.

I want to talk about Cardiff's color in this film, but I'm not sure what to say. Even if I knew what to say, I doubt I would know how to say it. Whatever it is I want to talk about is something different than what this article has to say:

Jack Cardiff: Painter's eye view

Cardiff said his filter palette was influenced by master painters. That's one way of looking at it -- his. I want to look at it my way.

I've read about the effects of peyote. I've read that colors from somewhere else are transposed onto or interfused with objects. A chemical transcendence in which vibrancy itself is made manifest as tones of metaphysical color. It's an entry into a dimension unsuspected by everyday consciousness. 

As with peyote so with Cardiff's colorology -- we're getting as close as we're likely to get to thingness-in-itself. An impossible depth of presence somehow also possible.

Jack Cardiff's cinematography in Black Narcissus happens as a convergence of hallucination, substance, and aesthetics. 

amazon.com

1914 - 2009

as if a manifesto

Why do we love certain symphonies, while merely appreciating or tolerating others? And when we listen, is it for evocation of images, holography of emotions, drama of gestures, or efflorescence of structures? Maybe a blending of all four?

I love Beethoven's Symphony No. 4 in B flat major, Op. 60 (1806). I can't quite put a decisive finger on why this symphony affects me the way it does. It's not about image, emotion, gesture, or structure. I've been pondering this thing for many years.  If I don't figure it out soon, my head will continue to explode in slow motion until there's no mind mass left.

I have a suspicion that I love this symphony because it sounds like the formal release of the Spirit of Aesthetics. And how it wordlessly suggests a manifesto: deepest art always moves with an aspect of beauty. 

That Beethoven fellow was exceptional. 

the splendor of false memory

I have a recurring image of a house set back from a certain strange street in El Dorado, Arkansas. A recurring image from my adolescence. The front yard was vast, with a curving driveway. I have a recollection of the interior of that house. I've never been inside that house. 

This recurring image is a false memory.

In my false memory, my cousins Judy, Janet, and Terry lived in that house. In reality, they lived two or three miles away. They never lived on that street of overhanging elms and moody time.  

There's a unique texture to this false memory. It's not like a stray piece of dream. It's even cooler than that. Wherever it came from and however it is that it keeps appearing behind my third eye are questions having to do with a dimension tilted away from reality. 

This isn't past-lives stuff, isn't supernatural or Jungian. It's way more interesting than all that stuff. Somewhere deep in my head, a wrong house has decided to exist containing three wrong cousins. I really don't want to know how or why. I'm just glad it's there.