Riding dirty and running with the devil.
And you thought vampirism was soooooo ’90s.
There is no way to put a gloss on the complete and utter failure of Rudy Giuliani’s Presidential run. It ranks as the single worst campaign in modern political history, a statement born out by the numbers: $50 million dollars spent versus one (1) delegate won. This startling incongruence– combined with Rudy’s neutered and anemic performance as a candidate– seemed like the end of a great beast. America’s Mayor was sent back to New York, tail tucked between his legs, finding solace only in the plastic of his mannequin bride and left to wonder, like all living objects of universal disgust, why no one liked him. It couldn’t have happened to a worse guy.
Giuliani reminds me of Dracula in the late-period Universal horror films, the ones where Frankenstein’s Monster fights the Wolfman and Dracula and Abbott and Costello. These films are formulaic in the extreme. Each ends with Dracula dying, and each begins with the corpse falling from the coffin. The stake is dislodged from the heart. The old dessicated skeleton returns to life, growing sinew and muscle on bone and flesh on sinew.
The vampire king emerges from death for one more hissing bloodfeast.
From the first lisping giggle, I knew that Rudy’s keynote speech was his return to form. The dark lord had finished with the daylight, had cast off the veneer of respectability and aristocratic manners, and returned to his roots as a cheap thug in a bad suit, his oversized shoulder pads disguising the feminity of his frame, and was ready to sink his fangs into the first available neck.
Prepped by McCain’s handlers, Rudy was without armor or sword. His one rhetorical device stripped away for the first time in almost seven years, America’s Mayor had to pretend that it was a 9/10 world; he had to tap into to his previous self, the earlier incarnation. Presented with a unique challenge– “Don’t Mention September 11th”– Rudy drew from his Inner Well of Hidden Strength and discovered anew that it was as it had been: a cesspool, a rotting festering sinkhole buried deep and clogged with a lifetime of malice and hatred.
I’m not sure at what point– maybe when America’s Mayor openly laughed at the idea of public service, or maybe when he characterized Obama’s life-story, pejoratively, as something that could happen Only in America– but somewhere in that despicable rant, I understood. I realized. I got it.
As a serious candidate for National Office, Rudy had burned himself out, yes, but now he has a new niche. He has become the mean-spirited little monster that the Republicans will bring out every two-to-four years. Whenever a nasty speech needs making, whenever an enemy requires besmirching. He will be there, snorting and laughing at his own jokes. He is a hack and a hatchet-man, the one who will do what the others will not. He is the in-house vandal, a dog that attacks on command and then returns, its mouth covered in blood, to lap at its master’s hand, longing only for approval.
But don’t fool yourself: his masters still hate him. Everyone hates him. Other than a brief blip in which American society went crazy enough that it finally– at last– was operating on Rudy’s wavelength of constant paranoia and aggression, this has been the defining factor of his career. He was voted into office not for likability or personal charm. He was elected as Mayor for a simple reason: he had promised to brutalize criminals. He knows that he is on the fringe of the party– that he is a creature viewed with suspicion, that old women from Nebraska cross themselves and hide cloves of garlic under their skirts whenever he enters a room– but he has no other options. No one else will accept him. This knowledge makes him dangerous, more eager to perform, to make sure that the knife unerringly passes under the ribs.
The small man will never get his balcony, but he is allowed to borrow podiums, and it is from these that he demonstrates his vacuity. There was a time, and I remember it, when Rudy seemed as if he might be a political figure with Ideas. You could disagree with those Ideas and you could be disturbed by the ancillary damage that accompanied them, but you never felt that you were watching a charade or a put-on.
There was a time, however distant, when he seemed his own man. His brief ascendancy has changed him. He got a taste of the real, pure stuff and wanted more. Painfully aware of his personal limitations, the only way Rudy could imagine himself scoring the mainline was to become yet another unsuccessful political void. Mitt Romney without the charm. Huckabee without the brains. John McCain without the competence. A sucking pull of desperation, doing whatever is necessary to Win. There is no value or long-held position that he will not reverse. Nothing is beyond compromise. Guns, God, abortion, gays, Jews, whatever. Even New York itself will be betrayed on command. If we woke up tomorrow & the nation had placed a value on lawlessness rather than order, Rudy would be first in line to refute his time as the Ball Buster. Reduction in crime rates would be blamed on subordinates, on underlings– America’s Mayor would recast himself as the man who had favored chaos but was held back by career politicians and the bureaucrats.
Yet there is a solace: the week is over. It is time for Republicans to stake the heart and hide the body. America’s Mayor will pass to his undying death, waiting in stasis for the next call of his masters. He will return, as he always returns, with his cheeks purpled by makeup and tufts of grey hair framing a face that he stole from Max Schreck. Watch his tongue, see how he licks his lips.
It is not a question of if, but of when.
Some monsters never die.
Text quoted from Volume 1, Number Four of the Cthulhu Prayer Society Newsletter:
By 1725, only 18 documented burials had occurred in the [North Burial Ground of Providence], clear sign that home burial was still preferred. The burial ground land was used for a town animal pound. A whipping post and stocks were set up there, too. The Rhode Islanders may have been rebels against the Puritans, but they were still Englishman, fond of dispensing corporal punishment for such offenses as reveling on the Sabbath.
Gravestone carving became a Providence profession with the arrival of John Anthony Angel, who came from Portsmouth, RI in 1747. Other gravestone carvers were George Allen, Seth Luther, and Stephen
Hartshorn.Finally, the idea of a civic burial ground caught on. As the population expanded and land grew scarcer and more valuable, it became plain that having Grandpa in the backyard was an impediment to business and real estate. The burial ground underwent expansion, with some houses along its edge vacated, the owners often settling for an exchange of land. The burial ground underwent successive expansions in 1747, 1764, 1776 and 1867.
The creation of Benefit Street, cutting across many vertical plots of land running up College Hill, also resulted in the relocation of a number of family plots to the North Burial Ground, with the endorsement and encouragement of the city fathers. Providence’s Quakers also acquired a designated part of the burial ground for themselves, moving their graves from Olive Street. Many other historic grave plots wound up in Swan Point Cemetery, which explains how a garden cemetery opened in 1846 has stones from the 18th century!
Taken by me some time later:
–
More Sarah Helen Whitman: HOURS OF LIFE and POE’S HELEN.
(PDFs via kobek.com. Ya heard?)
I avoid looking at this blog’s access logs– they alternate between the frighteningly active and the depressingly desolate and are too filled with obvious hits– but my occasional observations have noted a definite contingent of NYC peeps. Some I know, most I do not. Either way, tri-state stalkers and stans, now’s yer chance for public confrontation in a small space, apparently with a certain amount of nudity:
Storytelling thru Stripping
featuring: Ariana Reines, Jarett Kobek, Jason Tallon, Fritz Donnelly, and Christina Ewald
Thurs 9/18 @ 9pm
hiChristina
154 Orchard St between Rivington n Stanton
hiChristina.com
Ain’t it fun?
Courtesy our pal, Arafat Kazi:
–
A rough English translation is:
I will poot, I will poot
Once I poot, you will be destroyed
You will cook from beyond the grave
When I see a beautiful girl, my chest cries out with a Poot
My soul is taken over my an insane addictive daemon
I will poot, I will poot
Once I poot, you will be destroyed
I will reverse the hourglass of your life
I have eaten mangoes, berries, jackfruit, and lichees,
Every time I see a fruit I salivate
I will poot, I will poot
I will poot, I will poot.
There is always a point after any traumatic event– and when it occurs depends on the kind of event and its length– when you realize that the tension has eased; that it, like all things, has faded into the tapestry of your past. The fading can not be faked, nor can it be be forced. One must stick with the game until its end. Eventually you forget the general shape of people’s faces and the tone of their voices. They become strange memories. Homeric shades. You used to fuck her but now you don’t. He used to be your friend but now you can’t even remember his name. You can’t even recall El Paso, honey. This is neither the end of the world nor its beginning.
By the time that I left New York in 2006, I was sick enough to die. California has been, as is its long tradition, just this: a blissed out crash landing and small oblivion of sunshine and subdued misery. (There are many fine novels on this topic. Your friends can probably recommend several.)
My reoccurring problem in life is that I am infinitely cheerful; there is nothing that can throw me off my baseline of persistent amusement. All personal, and impersonal, tragedies are minimized as they become part of the laughing jag. Usually at my own peril. I had split NYC at the end of August 06. It took roughly a year to recover; it took the full two years to recognize that I had been suffering someone else’s disease.
Thinking back, one feels the passage of, literally, ten years. Hard to conceive, but exactly two years ago today, I hadn’t even exiled. It was a long time ago.
So. This is what you learn and what happens, in rough chronological order, when you return on the two year anniversary of your departure:
1. That you still really, really, really, really, really like New York. Even though everything you once loved has been destroyed and washed away and the West Village has chased out the queers and replaced them with the worst people on the planet. Even though the East Village is unrecognizable. Even though Brooklyn continues to bug the hell out of you. Even though dudes from DC carouse the LES. This may not seem a big thing, but I assure you that it is: three months ago, I remained convinced that hating New York was the reason I had taken leave.
2. Pretty much everyone that you know is insane. Not kinda crazy, not weird, but very possibly bonkers. Probably a side effect of aging and entering the grey zone of the 30s. This is not your problem: you know who you are, what you want and vaguely how to get it. You were crazy ten years ago. Then you got better.
3. Running into ex-girlfriends on the subway when they don’t recognize you is infinitely preferable to hanging out with them.
4. You will violate a long-standing rule and go to Pete, His Confectionery Shoppe in Williamsburg; it will be full of ridiculously attractive Christians. You will walk down Lorimer towards a party comprised of boring, unattractive hipsters. On the way, you will meet a 37 year old Irish-American drunkard and cokehead named Dennis. For twenty minutes, your pal Jason Tallon will talk to him about mobsters and organized crime; Dennis will give you the unwanted affection of masculine bonding. Naturally, you bring him to the loft party, where he spends about four hours intermittently hugging and kissing you. Somewhere in here, Dennis makes you feel his muscles; this signals to a girl from Sharon, Mass that she should come over and condescend. She regrets it. Later, back on the roof, you will give Dennis substance-abuse counseling and $20. You will beg him to not go spend it in the Marcy Projects. He promises he won’t. You know that he will anyway. Jason Tallon thoroughly disapproves, questioning your moral compass. Not all of us ride with the Good Book. You realize, yet again, that you really are the son of an alcoholic.
5. BookWorks of London has rejected your proposal for the Semina series that they’re doing with Stewart Home, a guy who has said very nice things about you in public. You got all the way to runner-up with your crazy Saddam Hussein psychedelic odyssey that you churned out in 5 hours before the deadline, but you didn’t make the cut. An Iranian guy beat you. You will wonder, for a few seconds, if being half-Turkish is not as good as being Iranian but then you decide, no, being Turkish rules even if Iranian women are, basically, some of the hottest women on the planet. Accidental photographic confirmation will be a few days forthcoming:
6. Later, before an audience of twenty, you will read an heavily-edited excerpt from the Saddam Hussein psychedelic odyssey. You will enlist your pal Kaia Wong to bang out a drum beat of accompaniment. Your performance will cause an earnest frat troubadour, guitar self-consciously out-of-tune, to walk out, his mouth spitting with rage. He tells Fritz Donnelly that he had to leave or else he would have punched you. He describes your reading as both “gibberish” and “a diatribe.”
Vote change, bro.
This will be the most successful reading of your life, the first time that it ever feels real, and convince you that you’re doing fine. Later, people get naked.
7. You will watch artist and filmmaker Jason Tallon spend two weeks with a dog. There will be no specific lesson. It will look a lot like this:
8. After a month of intense ambiguity, you reconnect with your old chum, elly jonez. You meet on the steps of Union Square and have no idea how to interact. You manage thirty minutes before you’re making out in Washington Square. Soon you are doing disgusting things on the streets of West Village. Screw Iain Sinclair– this is the real psychogeography. It’s two days before you’re temporarily living together in Park Slope. You will not know the names of the people who rent the place. You will love their cat, whose name you will also not know. When you leave, you realize that you have finally, at long last, come to a point in your life where things are completely intense, not a little sleazy and totally beyond your limited understanding. If nothing else, this has taught new lessons about beauty and loss.
9. When you get back to LOS ANGELES, it feels, as it always does, like you’ve entered another world. You have forgotten, as you always do, who the hell you are. It’s a little split-personality. You discover that you’ve left the bathroom sink running three weeks. You avoid reading symbolism into this fact.
–
BONUS: 10. Kanye West’s “Love Lockdown” is the best single of the last ten years, and True Blood is the awesomest trash ever.
