PDF

Dead Hand


by Chris Okum




I Have Nothing To Say

Isaiah Berlin: "Liberty for wolves is death to the lambs."

Three Circles

From Fable For One: The Effect of Auteur Theory on Culture and Politics, by Hiram van Hove, Red Grove Press, 2016: "It's no coincidence that the end of the Auteur Era was co-terminus with the election of Ronald Reagan. The authoritarian vision pioneered by the likes of Coppola, Spielberg, Friedkin, Bogdanovich, Cimino, et. al., was no longer necessary once it had trickled downwards from culture into the sewer of politics. Regardless of the content of some of Coppola's films, he was, is, and will always be a Cinematic Fascist, someone who believes in the great man theory of history, that only one person should be seen as being in control, and that the vicissitudes of every day reality should be kept as far away from the screen as possible. Coppola is only interested in presenting life as a metaphor, with his movies being nothing more than one artificial space after another, nothing but sets all the way down. As a viewer, you are given no free reign to explore in a Coppola film; your eye is directed, always, and with extreme prejudice, towards a character who is nothing more than a bald-faced stand-in for Coppola himself, usually a visionary of some sort who's being constrained by the pitiless forces of society. That Coppola's epigones always end up defeated is neither here nor there; what matters is that Coppola is only interested in presenting himself and what he himself sees. This is what is meant by an authoritarian vision. As audience members, we were trained during the first wave of New Hollywood filmmakers to except that the vision of one man - man being the operative word - should take precedence over a collective idea of how the world should be, and with Reagan, that notion became an ideology which we have ridden all the way to our current predicament, where men with no vision at worst and cheap vision at best have taken control of reality and are now forcing all of humanity to look at what they think is most important: themselves." 

Prix Fixe

On Page 155 of Nihilism by Nolen Gertz: "Like someone lost in a desert, we cling desperately to any guide who claims to know the way out, even if that guide was the one who led us into the desert in the first place."

Special Needs

My dad's third wife was a waitress who worked at Fromin's deli in Tarzana. On their first date, he picked her up from the deli, drove to a cul-de-sac of off Hayvenhurst Ave., and they had sex in his Mercedes. They were engaged to be married three weeks later. My dad's mom, also known as my grandmother, also known as "Momma," after being notified that my dad was going to marry a 25-year-old waitress who worked at Fromin's deli (my dad was 45-years-old at the time) hired a private investigator to gather information about my dad's third wife. Her name was Lisa. I should stop calling her my dad's third wife and start calling her Lisa, because that was her name, and I liked her. She was nice to me and she would cut my hair every two weeks because she was practicing to become a hair stylist. Anyway, the private investigator presented the information he had gathered on Lisa and then presented it to Momma, who then forwarded it along to my dad. The information was pretty benign. All the private investigator could dig up was that Lisa had been married to an low-level arms dealer from Israel and had a child with him (which my dad already knew), a son named Ariel who looked nothing like Lisa (she was tall and blonde with Nordic features) and who looked exactly like a low-level arms dealer from Israel if the low-level arms dealer from Israel was seven years old. My dad read the dossier on Lisa and told his mother he never wanted to speak to her again. That didn't stop Momma, though, as she kept the private investigator on retainer and told him to find something - anything - she could present to my dad so that he would stop from marrying a waitress who worked at Fromin's, who used to be married to a low-level arms dealer from Israel, and who had a seven-year-old son who looked exactly like a low-level arms dealer from Israel. My dad comes from a wealthy family, and his mother had a thing about him marrying young women beneath his station because she assumed the only reason any young woman would want to marry my dad was to get all of his money, which for reasons I don't exactly understand, my grandmother considered her money as well. I had no idea that the plot of Portrait of a Stripper is fairly similar to the story I just told you about my dad. I randomly selected it to watch, well, no, that's not true,  it wasn't that random, I've always had a crush on Lesley Ann Warren, and the fact that she had starred in a movie called Portrait of a Stripper made selecting it a pretty easy call. But as I was watching it, my wife came into the room and started watching it with me. When she finally grokked what the movie was about she got up from the couch, looked at me and said, "You're watching a movie about your childhood." For a second I pretended that I had no idea what she was talking about. But then I looked at my wife and said, "I know." My wife stood there for a few more minutes watching the movie, then she looked at me and shook her head. She said, "This is a movie about your childhood." I nodded. My wife shook her head and walked out of the room. 

Cream Jeans

No one understands how good you have to be in order to escape the working class. You have to be better than good. You have to be great. Because blue collar neighborhoods are pigsties. They got unions. Everyone wants you to be a member of a team. They want you to pay your dues. But not everyone wants to pay their dues. Not everyone wants to work the factory floor for forty years and get nothing out of it but a gold-plated watch and a hernia. Everyone should have the right to work where they want. Everyone should be able to do what they're good at, and if you're good at dancing, then you should be able to use dancing to get where you want to go, and if you want to go to Manhattan, then you should be allowed to dance your way across the bridge, away from the pigs keeping you down. If you can't make it out of this place you got no one to blame but yourself. You have to work twice as hard to lift yourself out of the shit. Because that's what these places are, they're places where people have sex like animals in front of each other, where young men slash each other across the face with broken bottles for reasons no one can remember, where beer and pills is what you have for dinner, where your father doesn't have a job and can't get one because he doesn't want one because every job leads to nowhere and nothing, where your mother screams at you for things for brother does, where your brother looks at the cross and all he sees is a man dying, where people try and keep you down and prevent you from escaping because they don't have the individual talent necessary to escape. This is the fallen world we're talking about. But there is another world, and you have to cross the bridge in order to get to it, a world where you don't need to be a member of a gang, where you don't have to shake paint for peanuts, where you don't have to bounce a ball against a wall as a way to conquer your boredom, where you can speak properly, where you can make love in private, where you can just be yourself, where you can have a career instead of a job, where the future hasn't been cancelled, where you don't have to act like you're from the old country, where you can choose who you want your family to be, where you don't have to do it with no one you don't want to do it with, where everything means something, where you mean something, where you don't have to think about who's above you on the food chain, where the rich don't constantly remind you what a dumb schmuck you are for allowing yourself to be ruled, where the entire system depends on everyone pretending that things are otherwise, where at night you descend into the subway in order to die, and where in the morning you  ascend upwards onto the city streets, the sun hiding behind the skyscrapers, born again, a friend in need, a friend indeed. 

We're Gonna Meet Jesus Tonight

Your cousin rips his shirt open. "Look!" he says to your Aunt and Uncle. Your Aunt says, "I can't talk, so I can't look." "Look! Look!" he says. Green iridescent Stars of David have sprouted from your cousin's nipples. Your Uncle looks and immediately collapses onto the wall-to-wall carpeting. Your Aunt finally looks and says, "I can't talk, so I refuse to look at your crazy tits." That night your Uncle, having recovered from this vision of ungodliness, sends telegrams throughout the Western Hemisphere.

Please Don't Do That

From Lost Objects: The Male Psyche And The Absent Mother, by Dr. Diane Chotikul, John Hopkins Press, 1988: "What matters for our analysis is that representational distinction is crucial for male sexual identity. A power of mental representation, by establishing boundaries around the self and separating it from the object world, also secures an identity for the male child which distinguishes the child from the mother. But if the male child fails to develop mental representations that permit separation and that establish boundaries, his sense of sexual identity will become confused. The ties of care and empathy with the mother (the first "object") will come to appear as threats to his hermetic boundaries and to his identity. This failure appears most importantly at an early stage of psychic development in the failure to represent the mother in her absence. Incapable of providing himself with the security and care he takes from her presence through his own mental representations, the child experiences her absence and his inability to compensate for it as abandonment and loss. The resulting narcissistic wound leads to feelings of insecurity and desires either to fuse with the maternal object or to withdraw entirely from an object world that is felt to be threatening and inconstant. Such withdrawal from the representation of objects leads to the development of compensatory private representations that are highly resolved and hypertrophic. These hypertrophic or exaggerated private representations overcome the confusion of boundaries that the early failure entailed by rejecting the object world altogether and thereby establishing extremely firm boundaries around the self which radically separate the self from from that world and from the threat of empathetic ties to it. The stronger the needed boundaries the more powerful and developed are these private mental representations in distinction, differentiation, quality, etc. The extreme instance of such fantasies is schizophrenia. These representations tend therefore to replace public reality, which is metonymic, contingent, and indeterminate, and fixed. The resulting security of boundaries helps reestablish a determinate sexual identity, since the object world associated with maternal inconstancy is left out of the picture. The final ingredient in this psychopathology is violence. The need to establish exaggerated boundaries through hypertrophic representations is carried out aggressively, and that aggression is directed against the mother, who is experienced as being responsible for the initial abandonment, loss of object constancy, and failure of mental representation. If care is linked to metonymic ties that confuse the boundaries of identity, then its inverse - uncaring aggression - will be valorized as the means of salvaging sexual identity. In patriarchal culture in general, the fixing of male sexual identity through idealizing metaphoric representations that establish firm boundaries will be linked to violence against women."
Endcap