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UGOLINO THE SIGNIFICANT: Has the little turd learned his lines yet?
REVEREND SYKES: Friends let us all pause here and listen together and reflect on the implications of such a revelation. That's right . . .
during a live broadcast of The Partners with God Club
[...] This is what Lynch is about in this movie: both innocence and damnation; both sinned-against and sinning. Laura Palmer in Fire Walk with Me is both "good" and "bad," and yet also neither: she's complex, contradictory, real. And we hate this possibility in movies; we hate this "both" shit. "Both" comes off as sloppy characterization, muddy filmmaking, lack of focus. [...] But I submit that that the real reason we criticized and disliked Lynch's Laura's muddy both_ness is that it required of us an empathetic confrontation with the exact same muddy _both_ness in ourselves and our intimates that makes the real world of moral selves so tense and uncomfortable, a _both_ness we go to the movies to get a couple hours' fucking relief from. A movie that requires that these features of ourselves and the world not be dreamed away or judged away or massaged away but _acknowledged, and not just acknowledged but drawn upon in our emotional relationship to the heroine herself--this movie is going to make us feel uncomfortable, pissed off; we're going to feel, in Premiere magazine's own head editor's word, "Betrayed."
I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it’s my own choices that’l lock me in, it seems unavoidable—if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.
[...] Here are some various things I tried: EST, riding a ten-speed to Nova Scotia and back, hypnosis, cocaine, sacro-cervical chiropractic, joining a charismatic church, jogging, pro bono work for the Ad Council, meditation classes, the Masons, analysis, the Landmark Forum, the Course in Miracles, a right-brain drawing workshop, celibacy, collecting and restoring vintage Corvettes, and trying to sleep with a different girl every night for two straight months (I racked up a total of thirty-six for sixty-one and also got chlamydia, which I told friends about, acting like I was embarrassed but secretly expecting most of them to be impressed--which, under the cover of making a lot of jokes at my expense, I think they were--but for the most part the two months just made me feel shallow and predatory, plus I missed a great deal of sleep and was a wreck at work--that was also the period I tried cocaine). I know this part is boring and probably boring you, by the way, but it gets a lot more interesting when I get to the part where I kill myself and discover what happens immediately after a person dies. In terms of the list, psychoanalysis was pretty much the last thing I tried.
No one's a yuppie because everyone's a yuppie, a consummate consumer, for U.S. purposes, today. Even—you will not leave this sampler unconvinced—that unlikeliest of markets, black recording artists on the leading edge of the pop explosion called rap: yuppiness right out their dactylic assonance, shouting at the tops of their trochee'd rhymes across an impenetrable emptiness that they are there, here, here-and-now: like Us in their self-conscious difference, their congregation at the altar of electronic Self; with Us in their alien hate; at the deepest level one with the yuppie U.S.
just feels so DFW
Serious rap's a musical movement that seems to revile whites as a group of Establishment and simply to ignore their possibility as distinct individuals—the Great White Male is rap's Grand Inquisitor, its idiot questioner, its Alien Other no less than Reds were for McCarthy. The music's paranoia, together with its hermetic racial context, maybe helps explain why it appears just as vibrant and impassioned as it does alien and scary, to us, from outside.
[...] how sex and violence and yuppie toys represent perfectly the urban black lifedrive to late-80s American glory. (This latter many older blacks despise as less dull than just a disgusting recidivism to a pre-King/Malcolm vision, like your kid pawning your Purple Heart to buy rubbers and gin.)
[...] Rap's highly self- and history-conscious unfamiliarity, its image of inaccessbility to established markets or truly teeming-mass appeal, is often reduced by critics to the kind of 'surly musical hostility' that, like Punk's, quickly loses its novelty for those outside, can become for Us like little more than looking at something poisonous in a tightly closed jar.
Except who exactly sealed the lid, this time? The mainstream record reviewer? He's but Market's bitchy mistress. The Market itself--Us? But everything the white rock listener pays to enjoy is black-begotten. [...]
[...] A stereotype [...] is just a false synecdoche, a token of the conceptualizer's ignorance or laziness, not of some certain distorted features' representative power. [...]
[...] It's way too easy for the pale to hurry across the deck, past the thick, light-wobbling window, and not once hear rap as anything but the weird anthemic march of one Other'd nation, marginalized and yet trapped in our own metropolitan center, a nation that cannot secede and may not assimilate and is thus driven still deeper inside, evincing all the brute anger and resentment we'd legitimate as political were it not anger with nothing visible else to it, no positive diode, none of the King-like 'vision' we've come to expect from any change that does not yield rubble. As an ever more conservative body politic and media audience, We are being conditioned, in an equation both sides of which may be unconscious, to see today's urban black world not as a demimonde shadowing but more and more as a cancer metastasizing inside our own, our few glimpses of anything like a 'real black world' coming just in statistics and mix radio and political shibboleths [...]