This is actually a poem (ok, a prose poem if you must) and was originally on the Ecce Aeon site before appearing on the Reveille website on August 10, 2017. It should be dedicated to Hunter Thompson and on many levels Haj remains eternally indebted to the great doctor.

CAROL

Henry was an old bastard. Fifty something with wrinkled eyes and an old pouty mouth made of whiskey and cigarettes. He really wasn’t any older than your father.

Henry had ridden across America in a fat bellied tomahawk made by Harley Davidson USA. He cut down at least twenty of the worst of them damned Kennedys. All twenty were momma’s boys and sucked their thumbs all the way to heaven…until Henry hit them over the skull with a wrench the size of your forearm.

Katydids bothered the old bastard along with those weird trunk-like creatures that had gnarled, greasy legs and a forked-tongue like the breath of your Aunt Cassie. Like salted coffee and sulphur or something rolled up in kerosene hair pits. He was absolutely screwed up and knew nothing about the crossroads he kneeled on.

Henry had a dog…back at his apartment on 39^th and 2^nd Avenue. He listened to rock and roll and twisted up a mean straight while it played the xylophone. This wasn’t like the last trip. Anyway, there was more weirdness and that barrel of pythons this time. It was crazier. Crazier by 49.

The first ghost was an old farm boy, or something without any arms. It limped like marionette gastric cramps with a touch of gangrene. The smell was the little pond no one knew about under the willows swirling in the moss of a thousand rains. He said his name was Randall…, or something like that.

Yesterday the old man was a child and knew God and saw his reflection in the hoary pool of misery and joy. Crammed between the Bible and his black book were twenty sermons written by the ever-loving promised-land preacher. He ate vegetarian and smoked reefer with his fellows. They never seemed to get too wracked out about anything, except maybe for praising God and raising holy Cain.

Rooted in his soul within the darkness. It was like a tiny beacon that no one could douse or put out. It told the time in seven thousand baby dancers and had a crest that showed no one, nor anything. Acetylene white light. The only thing that kept his limbs crawling through those bloody trenches at Verdun. It wasn’t over yet, but this kept speeding along a killer highway to Franken-bits and 40,000 lost souls who found nirvana.

Henry never saw the first ghost leave. It was only his mother putting him to bed. Singing night carols of peace and loving amongst the world that belonged to his lord and Satan. Evil was just bad feelings then. Not something you ate and wore. It was pure and simple. Today it’s all hell and a bad shit.

By the time the second one hit, it was all over. Henry was drooling lime tequila and orange marmalade. He sat in his own fumes. It was like olive oil and an old tire burning piss from sour cholera. He sat in it, man. This was where he ended up with a piece of frost in his beard and two bolts stuck through his neck and his skull. All play-dough and without any shine. It was pathetic and glorious at the same time.

It seemed to last a lifetime until his dog, Rex, spoke again. “It’s all pretty ugly in there, Henry. Why don’t you come out?” “That dog’s the third bitch,” Henry muttered as he laced up one boot.

“It’s the apocalypse of your soul”, Rex informed him matter-of-fact. “You miserable son-of-a-bitch”.

It wasn’t long before Henry was howling. The pain had never set him free. Until now.

He jumped.

Steven Stapleton

Look, I’ve been listening to experimental – let’s call it Industrial (of course, forgive me for this term) – music well, since its genesis (pun intended). We made our tapes. We were just kids…misfits among the misfits. Since this time I have had a deep appreciation for anything…and I mean anything…that Steven Stapleton has been associated with. Primarily, of course, this is the aural-astral travels of his project known as Nurse With Wound.

The biggest problem with talking about something like the work of Steven and NWW is that…well, you can’t really talk about it. Ultimately, you have to listen to it and, if you’re new to this sort of haunting and mesmerizing ear trip, you probably need to wash, rinse and repeat a few times before you find yourself immersed in the sounds of the cosmos. Here’s another major problem – literally everything that Steven – frequently in collaboration with other wonderfully talented alien beings – does is worth mentioning. So I would direct you to his body of work. Right now I am listening to Soliloquy for Lilith (1988-89). Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella (1979) was the first NWW recording and was made with John Fothergill, Heman Pathak and engineer Nick Rogers. How can a blog like this not mention his initial collaboration with Colin Potter on Thunder Perfect Mind (1992)? You can listen to literally anything that Steven has worked on and it will be an experience worth having.

As you may have guessed, this art is really a part of the surrealist art movement and if one would ask me, I would argue that surrealism (not to mention futurism and even dadaism) didn’t really hit its stride until guys like Stapleton had their take on it. Importantly, artists like Steven Stapleton can’t be put in a box, so labels like Industrial, Surreal and even Dada can never capture the avant garde of the truly innovative creative genius. Steven is a collaborating artist too and I suspect that collaboration brings the best out of him and his fellow artists such as David Tibet, John Balance, William Bennett, Colin Potter, Andrew Liles, Matt Waldron, and, of course, Diana Rogerson. There are many more that should be mentioned on this list, but this is a start. Hell, this sort of music craves collaboration even if the artists are (likely) a bunch of loners.

Here’s something else, Steven is an extraordinarily talented pictorial artist working under the name Babs Santini. He’s done most of his own album covers along with the far out décor of his houses in County Clare Ireland. Steven is one of the truly remarkable creative forces of our time and after almost 40 years, I suspect he has a pretty stout following of freaks like me. One thing freaks have got to realize – we’re not that freaky anymore!

So give Nurse With Wound a listen and you might find something new to wash upon your soul. There’s a total solar eclipse coming up, so that might be a good time to baptize yourself too. If you already love Stapleton and dig his sounds, drop me a line with your favorite(s) and we’ll all bask in the wonder of what Steven brings to this weird, wacky universe we call home.

This post originally appeared on the Reveille website August 15, 2017.

Jerry Lewis

Look this is about artists and their art. This isn’t a judgment of someone’s life, but about their contributions to our culture. May God’s grace shine on every one of us. So in the vein of celebrating living national treasures, I most emphatically nominate one of my favorite funnyman geniuses – the very talented, smart, and delightfully life-affirming Jerry Lewis. With Jerry and his comedy, one could forget the troubles of the world through laughter and entertaining mayhem. Jerry could grab us by our heart because he was almost always emotionally invested. It always seemed that his characters cared, so we cared too. Certainly, Jerry will also be remembered as the philanthropic star who founded and hosted the most well-known fund-raising event in television.

When you laughed at Jerry’s slapstick goofiness, you were always laughing at yourself. Some remember him best as the funny-guy, little brother (or even le femme) of the Martin and Lewis duo with their nightclub improvisations and films like The Stooge (1951) or Artists and Models (1955) featuring the wonderful Shirley MacLaine. For me, when Jerry took more control of his works as writer and director, he absolutely shined during the early 1960s with films like the comedic masterpiece The Bellboy (1960); The Ladies Man (1961); and the crazily hilarious The Nutty Professor (1963). The Geisha Boy (1958) is so sappy sentimental that I can barely watch it anymore, but it’s wonderful. Cinderfella (1960) and The Disorderly Orderly (1964), both directed by Frank Tashlin, are so fun I can watch them anytime day or night and, well, I guess, like Jerry, I’m a kid again when I watch these pictures.

Jerry Lewis’ characters weren’t everyman characters either. Like many comedic geniuses, he played the “little guy” – the underdog in a world structured for the strong. Much of his humor was how his socially awkward characters would interact with the more conforming, and socially acceptable, members of our world – the matronly and domineering, charmingly smooth operators either of the lovable variety like Dean or the patronizing and smug variety, successful business people and intelligentsia, and of course the bullies. He didn’t always get the best of them either, but he always had us on his side.

His humor did take a subversive slant on our society. Jerry seems to ask us about the misfits, the little guys and the weakest among us. If any deserve our sympathy, isn’t it these? Jerry’s characters always cared and in a real way this was another of the many qualities that set him in opposition to the character Dean Martin portrayed alongside Jerry. Maybe this is why Jerry always got my sympathy, even if I will always love Dean for the films he made with Jerry and for his smooth, mellow crooning. So we should treasure Jerry as one of the greats and for the timelessness of the art he shared with us all.

This post originally appeared on the Reveille website on August 9, 2017 shortly before his passing from this incarnation to the next. We still love you Jerry and praise God for your great films.

So last year on the Reveille website, we featured mini critiques of great artists. This was kicked off with a somewhat arid tribute to Woody Allen. It might be helpful to point out that these are not moral, ethical or other sorts of judgment of the artists in question, but of their work that can be freely judged and critiqued. We have the luxury of letting God judge the people while we judge the work. This first one on Woody was published on August 2, 2017 and expect more to follow.

Woody Allen

In the US, we should celebrate our living national treasures. Among these must be, if not the greatest, truly one of the greatest American filmmakers – Woody Allen. In six decades, Woody has blessed the world’s film-going public with a number of humorous, sensitive and thought-provoking experiences.

Woody never had what I call the “Keats-syndrome” – where many, if not most, artists have done their best works by the time they turn 25 (when Keats died after 4 years of unprecedented artistic output). Woody’s great films span his entire career from the experimental, gut-funny gondos like What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966), Take the Money and Run (1969) and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (1972); to his early comic masterpieces Sleeper (1973) and Annie Hall (1977); through his maturing and wondrous Manhattan (1979) and Stardust Memories (1980); the innovative Zelig (1983); his mid-80s streak of Broadway Danny Rose (1984), The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and Radio Days (1987); 1990s Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), Mighty Aphrodite (1995), Deconstructing Harry (1997); and into the 21^st Century with Match Point (2005), Midnight in Paris (2011), Blue Jasmine (2013) and Irrational Man (2015) none of these 2000s films actually featured Woody as an actor either. I have not watched the entire canon (and do I relish that fact) and there are simply too many film gems to list here.

Early on, Woody established his iconic, every-man character in the vein of Chaplin’s Little Tramp and like any great artist, he provided continuity with the comic geniuses like Groucho Marx and Harold Lloyd who preceded and inspired him. He would have been one of the true greats if this would have been all, but Woody continued to innovate and exercise a level of creativity and energy that has been exceptional in its artistic scope through a variety of genres, with its many achievements and innovations, and with its impact on culture and society yesterday, today and presumably tomorrow.

The Woody Allen we see in his films is obsessed with sex and death, but the films of Woody explore the living meanings of love and the complexity of human relationships. He forged a uniquely artistic trail through the post-modern cynicism that had begun to take root as he was transitioning from a successful writer into a successful filmmaker. Beyond the existential despair though, Woody was always there to develop a real sense of the hope to be found in how we relate and care for one another in an otherwise cold and callous world. As an artist, Woody Allen is truly a living American treasure.

OK, so 200 years ago, Mary Shelley published the remarkable novel Frankenstein. Certainly, a story for modernity and likely the first science fiction tale ever told.

Haj can not let this anniversary pass without some words – probably too many, but that’s for you to decide. Early on, Haj became a real fan of horror movies – all of them “oldies” now too. He considers himself somewhat of an expert on horror.

Frankenstein is likely one of the most influential works on Haj’s life too. One aspect that is so critical to this piece is the isolation of the creature and its commentary on the human condition.

A recent reading of the extraordinary and wonderful Truman Capote and his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, offered a poignant passage from one of its characters (Randolph), “…we are alone, darling child, terribly, isolated each from the other; so fierce is the world’s ridicule we cannot speak or show our tenderness; for us, death is stronger than life, it pulls like a wind through the dark, all our cries burlesqued in joyless laughter; and with the garbage of loneliness stuffed down us until our guts burst bleeding green, we go screaming round the world, dying in our rented rooms, nightmare hotels, eternal homes of the transient heart.”

So what follows is the first of four parts of an exploration of Shelley’s novel that Haj actually prepared while completing his belated undergraduate degree December 12, 2008 and that he called, “The Monster in the Mirror”.

The Monster in the Mirror: Death and Dystopia in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, weaves a metaphorical tale that works, often ambiguously, on a number of levels. Critics have since pondered how an 18 year old English girl could write such a powerful and complex tale. Whether she had more than editorial assistance from her talented paramour Percy; drew inspiration from her pedigree and upbringing; or was the right woman in the right time to combine these advantages from a place that Yeats might call the Spiritus Mundi. Whatever her inspiration, the novel did draw from the well of civilization’s most powerful myths and stories, most obviously from Milton and Ovid, while something prophetic and starkly modern was being crafted. The gothic novel Frankenstein presents a secular retelling of the story of a fallen humanity’s search for redemption. 

After assembling the necessary raw materials, Mary Shelley imbues her creation with the spark that seems to give the narrative a life of its own. Like her creature leading its master, the story tirelessly drags the reader into an abyss of inevitability. Echoing a timeless literary theme, Fate, it seems, will be fulfilled (Sutherland, lec. 1).

Even before the story begins, the reader is warned of the relationship between knowledge and a “fall” with the evocation of the two important creation myths of western civilization – the theft of fire by the Titan Prometheus suggested in the novel’s subtitle and the epigraph that quotes Milton’s influential epic retelling of the loss of innocence in Eden. Ambitious desires for an unearthly and secret knowledge bring about the downfall of Frankenstein and all that he loves. Pandora’s Box is opened, death enters the garden, and knowledge is exchanged for a soul.

Mary Shelley’s reconstituted dire warnings of intellectual ambition have resonated since they were first published in 1818. Europe was at a critical crossroads when the novel was first conceived. War and revolution had wracked the continent, Britain was beginning to industrialize, and firmly established Christian orthodoxy and entrenched Scholasticism were already being challenged by the Enlightenment. George Levine, in “The Ambiguous Heritage of Frankenstein”, places the novel where “the central dualities of a culture in which reason and science were displacing religion as the centers of value” (29). In “Frankenstein as Mystery Play”, Judith Wilt is more provocative by describing the novel as “painfully acting out under the nose of the Enlightenment a long line of expunged doctrines – Justification, Creation, Damnation – and unspeakable sacraments – Holy Orders, Confession, Communion” (32). The institutions of the past along with their beliefs would steadily be replaced with the steely spires of “a diseased ‘technological society’” that Frankenstein seemed to foreshadow like no other work of its time (Levine/Knoepflmacher xii).   

Mary Shelley and her poet-companions in the summer of 1816 – Percy Shelley and Lord Byron – are said to belong to the Romantics. Romanticism was a direct reaction to Enlightenment thinkers and their claims of truths grounded in the material universe. The Romantics would view imagination, sensation or emotion as qualities as valuable (or possibly even more valuable) than Enlightenment rationale. Charles Woodard in his essay “The Archetype of the Fall” summarizes the Romantics as those who found “the present uninhabitable” and who believed “a more habitable world exists somewhere either in time or space” (580). As described by John Sutherland in his lectures “Classics of British Literature”, the Romantic revolution returned poetry to a primal and natural state (lec. 26). These artists, poets and thinkers dreamed of lost and mythical places of an idealized past or of the beauty and peace of nature unspoiled.

The explorer Walton and scientist Victor Frankenstein not only represent the Enlightenment’s search for truth in the material universe, but also demonstrate Romantic idealism. For scholars Michael Manson and Robert Scott Stewart writing in their essay “Heroes and Hideousness: ‘Frankenstein’ and Failed Unity”, artistic and scientific genius was linked through a “concomitant attribute of creative imagination” (231). Walton and Victor represent the Romanticism of the Enlightenment or the dreams of the scientific age. Victor is “a sublime quester” for Paul Sherwin who finds the connection of “Romantic faith in the omnipotence of thought” with “the scientist’s baleful drive for manipulative control” in his essay “Creation as Catastrophe” (894). Walton, whose narrative forms the outer layer of the novel, heads to the north pole searching for something “surpassing in wonders and beauty every region hitherto discovered on the habitable globe” in “a country of eternal light” (6). Victor, whose interest he himself terms “metaphysical”, searches “with a gladness akin to rapture” for the elixir of life – a reclamation of the fruit from the tree of life and the secret of creation that represents the key to the “physical secrets of the world” (36, 53). The enlightened explorers of Frankenstein, it seems, have inherited the dreams of their superstitious forefathers.

As Charles Woodard describes in his essay “The Archetype of the Fall”, a chasm that had opened between humanity’s unique capacity for reason and the more brutish sensations of a primeval existence would be “suddenly greatly widened by the special extension of the rational processes in the sciences” (579). All too human desires were to set overreaching humankind up for a second Fall. Walton wonders of Victor, “Do you share my madness” (24)? Indeed, both Walton’s search for an Arctic Xanadu and Victor’s god-like quest for eternity are realized as nightmares – of barren icy seas and the murderous plague of a demon.

While the intellectual Milton might wish to somehow excuse the theft of knowledge as humanity’s original sin, Mary Shelley’s story of a modern Prometheus permeates with the idea that “sorrow only increased with knowledge” (157, Sutherland lec. 12). Manson and Stewart argue that the “illusions of divinity” propelling the entirely modern “would-be” genius of the Romantic scientist/artist were “limited and constrained by the very finite conditions it tried to escape” and were doomed by the finitude of their medium – the imperfections and limitations of nature and their own place in a natural world (231). The Earth and all its denizens remain trapped in the mortal confinements of limited time and space. All of the artifices and creations of humankind are likewise imperfect and flawed. Visions of angels and demons, immortality and paradise are only dreams, after all.

Mary Shelley’s creation, like the Creature that moves through it, is “another ‘imperfect animation’” (Sherwin 898). Sherwin claims that the Monster’s “principal virtue is virtuality” for it is “a kind of wandering signifier” that ignites meanings that “multiply endlessly” (890). The novel is the Creature, the writer is the creator, Frankenstein is an artist, and the reader intimately participates in the “self-alienating labor that constitutes authorship” or the unholy reanimation of the dead (Sherwin 891, 894, 898-9, Woodard 580). As Levine and Knoepflmacher state in the preface to the volume The Endurance of Frankenstein, the images and story “enter both our private and culturally shared store of dream, fantasy, and myth” (xiii). Art, science and language are all the imperfect artifices of an imperfect humanity.

Language, for the Creature, is seen as “a godlike science” that is mirrored in the necromancy of Victor’s science and “for the first time in the novel Mary Shelley links language to the creation of the monstrous itself” (Lamb 312). For Wilt, the novel is the recurrence of “the same ecstatic despair before the old aesthetic paradox” of art and of Frankenstein’s science – in striving to achieve beauty the poet has only loosed upon the world “an image of death” (44). As John Lamb explains in “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Milton’s Monstrous Myth”, while language is presented as some “transcendental” medium that can allow one to “master the monstrous” and escape the finitude of the mortal life, it is actually and ironically monstrous itself – language limits and is spawned from the limiting definitions of its “cultural hierarchy” (312). So as literature relies on the trickery of metaphor, irony and ambiguity, the Monster is defined by a culture that has not found a place (or a name) for him – he is either Adam or is Lucifer (Lamb 312, Sutherland lec 4). The consequences are not a mastery of the self, but the mastery of the self through the cultural forms pre-existent in language (Lamb 312). Monster, creator, and language can not be freed from the bonds or labels of an all too imperfect mortality. It is in his name – ‘Frankenstein’ is a “free rock” or the “free-unfree man” (Sherwin 894).

More to come – part one of four parts