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Why? 왜? ¿Por qué? Почему?

Originally published in 1998 in Japan and first translated by Stephen Snyder in 2013, Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales is a collection of 11 short stories that are linked together in curious ways. The stories range from whimsical to outright dark and teach us that we should never fuck with women. As much as men want to belittle them, women have the capacity to fuck you up right. Well, not fucking you upright, but I’m sure they can do that as well. As a platinum gay, I’m not quite sure about the mechanics.

As great as it was reading this, whenever I read translated material I always have something gnawing at me in the back of my mind: Is this really how the author intended that sentence to read? When I hear people talk about what a great translation a certain publication is, I wonder how they know. Unless you are fluent in the original language, how do you know if this is a great translation? I hear YouTubers say this a lot, and I just wonder if they’re just echoing from a press release or what they hear other people saying.

I don’t know how true to the original this translation is, but it was a quick fun read. Perfect for this Halloween season.

De Leon - Martinez

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Kevin De Leon Must Resign

Yesterday the LA Times reported on a recording made a year ago that found LA City Council president Nury Martinez, fellow councilmembers Gil Cedillo and Kevin De Leon and LA County Federation of Labor president Ron Herrera making fun of and using racist comments targeting fellow city councilmembers Mike Bonin (and his adopted son), Nithya Raman, Marqueece Harris-Dawson, the Oaxacan community and the black community. LAist has a good non-paywall writeup of everything that is involved.

Well, guess who is a constituent of Kevin De Leon? And guess who wrote an angry email telling him to resign? I already have a low view of the city council as a whole with their impeccable handling of the homeless crisis. But anyhow, here is the quick note I sent off to his office:

As one of your constituents in Downtown LA, I was shocked to hear your voice on those recordings the LA Times reported about yesterday. While my esteem of the council is already very low especially with the way the council has handled the homeless crisis in the city, this in-fighting that only serves the very powerful few just furthered sank my opinion of the council. And with you as a part of this conversation, I do call on you to resign for the sake of the city. 

It’s easy to make councilwoman Nury Martinez the scapegoat here since she spat the majority of the venom that was exposed on the recording. However beyond the racism and the epithets uttered, the blatant power hungry motives that surfaced show that all involved are not interested in making the city a better place to live. I mean, I’m not so naive as to not think there are ambitions of power, but for it to be so blatant is quite sickening. 

You can apologize, ask us to judge you on future actions like councilwoman Martinez did, however you broke the trust. I don’t trust you to make the decisions to make the city better and specifically to make Downtown LA a better place to live and do business. 

As your constituent and my representative on the city council, I ask you to resign. 

That’s it. We’ll see what happens. We have elections for five of the districts coming up, and Cedillo already lost his primary and is on his way out. But you know what? FTP.

20221001_125232

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J R – Money Money Money

“Money…”

That’s how William Gaddis’s 1975 masterpiece J R begins, and that is probably as concise of a thesis statement as ever was written in Western literature.

I first picked up J R sometime 2007 or 2008 at Skylight Books based on a small employee recommends card on the shelf in the fiction section. I had never heard of Gaddis before this, and evidently the recommendation was enough for me to take it home. As easy as it was to convince me to pick it up, reading it was a completely different matter.

Who the fuck writes a book in unattributed dialog? Even more using European standard for notation of dialog using the em-dash rather than quotation marks? Over 90% of the book is in dialog, and there are transitions in between scenes that are… Well, let’s just call it poetic for lack of a better term. This makes everything so jarring and disorienting for the uninitiated that you have no other option that to put it away after trying to gut it out after 100 or so pages. You don’t know who’s talking, where they are talking or why. It’s like reading a play with just the words, no character listing, no italics for stage direction – just everything jumbled together.

I’ve attempted this book many times over the last 15 years or so never getting farther than 150 pages. So what made this different? I decided to say fuck it and read this as slowly as I needed to. It didn’t matter that it took me an hour to get through 25 pages. I was going to do what I needed for these 726 pages (in the edition I had) of words to imprint in my brain.

And imprint it did.

This book is a scathing satire taking aim at American laissez-faire capitalism, the commodification of the education system, the waning impact of the arts in culture, gender norms and more all in this symphony that culminates in a fucking chaotic entropic mess. Among the players:

  • J R Vansant – The titular 11-year-old kid who uses the adults around him to amass wealth at any cost. He’s too young to really understand ethics which is perfect in Gaddis’s critique. “I mean why should somebody go steal and break the law to get all they can where you can be legal and get it all anyway!” By the end as everything crumbles around him, he justifies his actions by repeatedly saying that if he didn’t do it, someone else would have done it.
  • Edward Bast – A wannabe composer who daylighted as a substitute teacher for a day, ran into JR, owed him for train fare which is what got him involved in JR’s schemes. All Bast wants to do is write his music, but the whole world conspires against him.
  • Jack Gibbs – A teacher at J R’s school, he is a drunk and would-be author. He has an apartment on 96th Street that becomes the de facto headquarters of the J R Family of Companies. This is a broken-down apartment with leaky faucets that become torrential waterfalls, where mail is piled everywhere, where the Second Law of Thermodynamics has come to life.

There are so many other characters here, that it is impossible to make a complete list. But you can see where it is going.

What also fuels this book is the absurdity of it all. In the beginning, the kids of the J R’s school are rehearsing Richard Wagner’s “The Ring Cycle” at a Jewish Center. Then you have the school who messed up installing their closed-circuit television system for school learning and made it open-circuit allowing anyone to watch the programs. How horny all of the men are.

Sure this book required my full attention, took me a month to read, confused the hell out of me at times. But it was a fucking masterpiece and rewards everyone who can push through.

Breast Implants

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I Can’t Stand All of You

We are all such insufferable tits.

First we have the obvious assholes, the fascists we call the republican party who are trying to turn this place into a combination fundamentalist Christian theocracy, a Ku-Klux-Klan utopian wet dream and the Fourth Reich. Then we have their counterparts where every perceived cultural slight and sin must be condemned by stripping all means of sustainability of life and forever be branded with the scarlet letter, where there is no room for growth or forgiveness. On one side you have the Hitlers, on the other you have the Puritans. Germany 1939 or Salem 1692?

There’s no wonder why I prefer the company of my cats to getting outside the confines of my apartment.

I don’t have an answer to this, because I don’t have any faith that people will calm the fuck down. Who knows? Maybe we’ll all burn in a Schopenhauerian hellscape where I just sit in the middle of it all roasting marshmallows. Or it will be the death of a thousand papercuts which, if it’s done correctly can be arousing. I mean if it’s going to be over, might as well have a hard on, right?

These are just some thoughts I had this week. I have been busy reading William Gaddis’s J R. A book that is almost entirely unattributed dialogue, I’ve tried to read this several times before never getting past the first 120 pages. But I’ve changed the way I read getting rid of all distractions including music, and most importantly allowing myself to read slowly. And by slowly, I mean I can only get through about 25 pages in each sitting. It’s taken me three weeks to get through 3/4 of the book. THE END IS IN SIGHT!!!! And I have to say the hype of how genius the book is is I think justified.

I can’t believe it’s already October. I’m in Europe late next month to the beginning of December. Then it’s 2023. Fuck.

Fountain Pen

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The Gayest Thing Ever…

I can’t believe it’s taken me nearly 43 1/2 years, but I finally own a fucking fountain pen! A FOUNTAIN PEN! Look at it!

My new fountain pen.

Granted this is a cheap version of a fountain pen, a Pilot Metropolitan Collection with a fine-point nib available for purchase at chez Amazon for only $17.50. But in the weekend I’ve had it, it hasn’t ripped through any paper or had any ink accidents. It is brass and not plastic which makes it feel a lot more permanent. And of course it is refillable which does, in a sense, make it permanent and not disposable.

I bought this because I wanted something to help me start reading again, and doing it a bit more seriously and critically. As anyone who follows me on Goodreads or StoryGraph, you’ll see that I finished the following books since the start of the month:

  • Queer by William S. Burroughs
  • Communions by Adam Lehrer
  • Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
  • On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

And that I have started JR by William Gaddis again.

I wanted something to help me jot things down, converse with books, and the pretention of a fountain pen I thought would be perfect. Yes, I realize I am saying that I bought a fucking pen because I thought it would help me read better. And yes, I know how ridiculous that sounds. But of all the things I have bought impetuously, this is probably one of the cheaper things I have purchased. It’s not like I purchased 15 books or anything. Um…

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Why Do We Let Them Do This To Us?

Over the weekend I started watching Yes Theory and Drew Binsky travel vlogs, especially the ones that showcased “dangerous” or “hostile” countries. What struck me was how welcoming the people in those countries are and reinforced the notion that the governments of the countries are not the people of the countries.

We all know that politicians are no better than scum on this planet, so why do so many people lose their heads over them?

Look at all the dumbasses gathering around Mar-a-Lago after the FBI raided Trump’s estate. And look at all the Hillary Clinton acolytes cry when she lost in 2016. Why do people keep putting their hopes in these scumbags when all they do is disappoint? Seriously, they act like a bunch of mental defects frothing at the mouth over whatever version of reality they believe in.

These fuckheads get off on dividing us, on stoking Civil War. And we’re letting them do it to us. Like KMFDM said in their 1996 song “Dogma”: “We don’t run Washington and no one really does/Ask not what you can do for your country/Ask what your country did to you.”

I fucking hate politicians. I hate the people who idolize them. I hate people who can only talk politics. We can do better than this.

God's Country

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God’s Country

Here is the first sentence on Chat Pile’s debut album God’s Country‘s Bandcamp page about the album:

There’s a sick irony to how a country that extols rhetoric of individual freedom, in the same gasp, has no problem commodifying human life as if it were meat to feed the insatiable hunger of capitalism.

Keep that in mind while you close your eyes and imagine that being delivered along with the dissonance of Jesus Lizard and the screaming earnestness of a young Kurt Cobain.

Those of us who loved premillennial non-metal guitar music have given up hope. Either we have to listen to the dad rock and soothing beats of Wilco and Spoon or just go back to spinning our old LPs and 7″s just remembering when we paid $5 to pile into a room on the verge of collapse or someone’s living room just to sweat and get bruised and beat up while incrementally losing our hearing and getting tinnitus. It almost makes you want to say, “Those were the days.”

Except we have been conditioned to fucking hate nostalgia, to mistrust our own hazy memories mostly because they’ve been clouded over thanks to the meth, the coke, the pot, the heroin and everything else we polluted into our bodies all the while sanctimoniously claiming to be vegan. You know, cuz we’re better than you.

Oklahoma City’s Chat Pile’s debut album has the sounds of that nostalgia but cuts through it with clear protests on things going on now. While Jesus Lizard’s and Nirvana’s lyrics were cryptic, Chat Pile is more direct. Hell, their name is taken from piles of byproduct of lead-zinc mining in northeastern Oklahoma. Raygun Busch bellows, “Why do people have to live outside/In the brutal heat or when it’s below freezing,” in “Why.” “Deeper cuts/Bloody sheets/Making money/Man on/TV/Haunt You/Haunt Me” on “Tropical Beaches, Inc.”

See? Pretty straightforward.

The initial drum beats and the scream by Busch, the explosion of the sludge guitars on album opener “Slaughterhouse” instantly made me hard. All of the sounds then combined to scramble my brain making me want to punch someone, have them punch me back and get fucked hard leaving us all in a dirty disheveled heap with bruises, blood, sweat, spit and cum.

After the initial shock of the album, the album kept pushing making the complex seem effortless. The augmented and diminished chords, the tritones and nonstandard song structures: all may seem accidental on the surface but are actual genius in how they are combined to make this concoction hauntingly beautiful.

I’m not going to say that this is a sign that our version of rock and roll is back, that we can dust off our aching bones and muscles and again cram into these now-condemned buildings (oh shit, they have been demolished and turned into fucking condos!) But here is something from 2022 that we can bang our heads to, turn the volume up and have these Millennial and Gen Z pussies cry out, “Ouch my ears, what is that fucking noise?”

Vin Scully

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Goodbye Vin

The broadcast voice of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Vin Scully, is shown the pressbox of Dodger Stadium before the start of their baseball game against the San Francisco Giants and the Dodgers, in Los Angeles, Wednesday, Aug. 1, 2007. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)

Aging is inevitable. I feel it every morning as I take my blood pressure medication, my cholesterol medication, my anti-depressant, my PrEP. I feel it with every death of a legend. With the death of Vin Scully, it’s just hitting harder.

I did have the privilege of seeing Vin for the better part of four years while I covered the Dodgers for LAist. I still remember the first day I went to cover a game at Dodger Stadium. Not only did I have to pull over on the way to throw up from the panicky butterflies in my stomach, when I was pissing in the pressbox bathroom, Vin walked up to the urinal next to mine and greeted me with a, “Hello there.” It was the only time I nearly passed out in a bathroom outside of a gay bar.

Every home game Vin was scheduled to broadcast, we saw each other. He told stories. Well, all of you know the stories he told. And he elaborated on them and even more. He talked about his lifelong fear of actor Bela Lugosi after watching Dracula as a kid. He talked about once getting Babe Ruth’s autograph on a ticket stub but having his mom throw it out.

Vin was one of the rare people I’ve ever met who was both greater than fiction and humble to a fault. When you first see him in person, you lose your breath in his elegance. Then he greets you, and he makes you feel like a friend. You are gobsmacked first that you are talking to Vin fucking Scully, and then from the fact that he is that exception to the rule that you should never meet your idols: he never disappointed.

Rather than repeat all the tributes that have been written and said, I will just say that we (and I mean my fellow Angelenos) have lost our uncle, our grandpa who soothed us when we were going through shit, taught us about life, literature, archaic expressions. I still say “the best laid plans of mice and men,” and “hoisted by his/her own petard.”

Events and people pass, and so does our youth. We are no longer that nine-year old watching Gibson hit the homerun over the right field wall and hearing, “She is… GONE!” We are no longer that 30-year old who first heard Vin’s voice in person and nearly passed out. Like our youth he’s gone forever except in our hearts. I’ll miss him, and I wish him a very pleasant good evening wherever he may be.

Obey the Kitty

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Idle Surfing

Because my mind can’t comprehend the news that just broke without going hysterical and cry out the sky is falling, I will instead present a poem I created throughout the day from random snippets from social media and work emails. 

Vaginal dryness sucks 
You have no idea how much this hurt 
Maintenance de routine. Pas grave.
You deserve this special offer
It's been too long
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