Every time you have a villain who cannot be redeemed, can't be
turned into a friend, you have fascism. That's the beauty and sensitivity of the
work of Val Lewton. He was sensitve, like a chick. Us he-men, every once in
awhile, we get our sensitivity on and we're like wow, life has meaning and
value.
Then it's gone
WARRIOR MIND:
Men are encouraged to
develop it, women aren't. You see it develop in revenge films, sensitive guy
goes from family man to ruthless killer. The warrior
mind can be used for good but that's a weird hard road. The warrior mind is in
three stages generally:
1. Grasshopper Stage -- Able to ignore skinned knees in a
single bound, knows how to use "radar" (as in
a crowded train station), likes to collect stuff. The Bad News Bears
2. Thug Stage --- Petulant door kicking, pulling girls
hair and running away to prove you are not afraid, D-Day, The Marshall Plan, Wheel alignment, Butch Cassidy,
3. The Pinnacle Stage -- Howard Hawks, Bogart, John Wayne,
Patton, Conan
4. The Too far Stage - Syd Barrett, Charles Manson, Pol Pot,
Hitler, Keith Moon,
The Mai Lai
Massacre, serial killers, The Cleveland Browns.
For no damned reason.
-----------------
The Sunflower Attorney
My neighbor is home, drunk.
I assume via loud, erratic thumps.
And bam the bathroom pipe
erupts with muffled steaming; once it stops
some deep down voices yell and cops with sirens
screaming loud then turning down and distant from outside.
Look how easy it wasn't
I gave pens to the lepers and rent to my cousin,
fingers fall like butterflies dipped in inky rain,
the ceiling heightens,
smartens, brightens.
Man, he just wont stop thumping!
Hideous heart, beat it, get thee gone.
Tear this out from, not my night but my pink-lipped
breakdancer Dynamite Dawn.
Look at her spin like a greaseless lightning, Travoltage
cruising
on through the coarse thrushes of winter tedium,
blazing past the tomorrow pocked by babies,
up through daisies like a George Alpha Romero's morning
rushes,
caffeine and take threes, monitors alight with needy moms
and temporary insanity no longer a sound defense:
three farmers, one chick, one back fence.
You do the math, you hillbilly sandbox cutter of men.
Let me count from one to ten
with this here magnum you can blow me, head, unclean off,
and then be towel dry for supper, and I'll not piss off your
dad I swear,
so kneel down and take it off,
strip the bolt til it's bachelor-laid bare,
exposed to chilly, feet-smell air
let all the neighbors come and see
the low row backhoe toad called
me.
Ah, the other neighbor sneezes. He's the one behind the
brick wall to my right.
A whole other story...
the key to balance is in not giving up too much power to any
of your troops, as if you were a general. A good general uses every strategic
trick for the ultimate benefit of all. Finally freed from the bonds of self, he
still has to acknowledge the self-ishness of his troops and to forgive them for
it. Think about the root word of selfish, i.e. as part of the family of -ishy
adjectives: oafish or thuggish, hashish (How very hashish of you). But to be
selfish is then to lean towards an abundance of the self; to let the light bulb
brightness of ego blind one to the sun at large. How can a good general not go
mad watching his troops stagger through the world blinded by light bulbs when
there's a perfectly good sun right above them if they'd only look directly in
it? He must forgive and tolerate with the same patience a father watches his
infant son.
Anything less is to succumb
to eventual madness.
Writers are forever trying to capture unique mental states,
in order to trigger them in others. The butterfly nets catch both fairies and
poseurs, gently daffo-dealing lilacs cresting past lucrative enchantments and panic attacks to
get to the pearl of wisdom. Jump twice not once
from love's embankment.
As dreadful sorrow attorneys with
golden sunflowers
stand near yet far away from the awful scene.
Only we, the chosen, see that both sides of the fence are
fucked.
No choice then but to dig, dig dig.
Below all fences, into
the nasty beating-blackness
of the crude oil void.
Grab some spoonfuls of crusted treasure
and hope it's what heals
our empty tanks,
wheels our steel-enforced, four-door gurney farther
from the morgue
and seals our floors.
