1
Once I was arguing with a crypto-conservative (who thinks of himself as a Radical Commie, despite the fact that most of his old friends and close family are Wealthy) and he riposted a statement of mine with the classic evasion, “It’s more complicated than that.” As I always do, I responded to that with: “I have time. I’m a quick learner. Explain the complexities.” Ah, but he couldn’t. I have dedicated my social life to stamping out that particular rhetorical flourish (by putting a prohibitive price on it).
2
“Commenting, or not commenting, on an injustice or an atrocity, is exactly the same as marching, or not marching, or donating or not donating, as a response: if a lot of people do it, it will have an effect, if no people do it, it will have no effect and if few people do it, it’s better than nothing. But the main difference between the first option and all the others is you have far less of an excuse not to do it.”
3
Will Self
A Point of View on cannabis on Radio 4 can be heard here.
Reconsidering cannabis and the law – Will Self
Will’s latest New European column has landed.
.
Steven Seven Augustine Brave Will! Unflinchingly, in this land-mined culture, he confronts the most controversial and high-stakes issues. The man is fearless.
3
Capitalism: psychopaths lying to idiots with new lies every minute.
Politics: psychopaths lying to idiots with the same lies every year.
Civilization: psychopaths and idiots working together to keep the messiahs in check.
4
HAS ANYONE INVESTIGATED THE SCIENTIFIC LINK BETWEEN SELF-ISOLATING, AND SELF-MOCKERY, YET…? -a lament
The Overlord Game is a vicious game. The Overlord Game is to turn people into violent, disengaged, shallow, superstitious Serfs and then despise the Serfs for being violent, disengaged, shallow and superstitious. Rather like the overbearing father who belittles his son into becoming an inveterate bed-wetter and then beats him for it.
It’s only when you understand that birth rates are falling, anyway, that you understand that the “overpopulation” obsession, of the Overlords, is merely a convenient excuse.
Black America is fundamentally emblematic of this sinister paradigm; stripped of original language, culture and familial connections and sold into servitude, there was no group more vulnerable nor captive, for so many centuries of concentrated abuse, for the Overlords to demonize, destroy, despise and then further destroy. Any Black American who isn’t batshit insane or bedevilled by complexes and is, rather, capable of balanced self-appraisal and constructive engagement with her or his environment should be recognized as a Super Woman or Super Man. And, behold, after 400 years of selective breeding, for physical strength, many Black Americans are precisely that; what’s important is to find the ones who aren’t nuts. But what is true about Black American Serfs (minus the physical breeding) is true for all Serfs, at some point.
So pay attention to yourself.
5
I always find myself on a tiny island of the Ultra Minority between totally opposite, and equally-absurd, clans: when I was a teen in Vegas in the early ’70s I was caught between Racist Whites and Plantation-Hijinks Blacks; in the Twin Cities in the early ’80s I was caught between Yuppie Scum and Hippie Flakes, then it was entitled New Wave druggies versus deluded New Age Karens. In the ’90s it was pro-Clinton suckers versus pro-Bill-O’Reilly nitwits, monkey-like-Dubya’s supporters versus faux-liberal lying Gore’s or sneaky Kerry’s fangirls. When the early 2000s hit there were the people who couldn’t see through Rush Limbaugh versus the people who couldn’t see through Jon Stewart, the scary “support our troops” hawks versus the idiotic “support Sharia law in London” liberals, the primitive Tea Baggers versus the “If Women Ran the World It Would Be Paradise (just ignore all the Margaret Thatcher/ Evita Peron/ Indira Gandhi/ Madeline Albright/ Condoleeza Rice/ Aung San Suu Kyi/ Mother Teresa/ Marie Le Pen/ Christine LaGarde, A. Merkel, et al, evidence to the contrary)” zealots; the Rape Culture Addicts versus the Soy Boy Simps; the slimy Good Old Boys versus the creepy Obama; the Evil Hillary versus the Hideous Donald…
…and NOW I find myself caught between otherwise intelligent people who are somehow childishly TRUSTING corrupt cartels to run a for-profit Xperiment, with Human health, on a scale unheard of in the history of the planet (after securing blanket legal protection against injury-notices that are already mounting rapidly)… a danger to humans now and in the future, in perpetuity…
versus
…people clever enough to distrust said cabals, and speak out against them, and show a healthy general Skepticism BUT
… who ALSO fucking believe in the goddamn Bible, and Flat Earth, and UFOs, and that the world is 6,000 years old and in “Shape-Shifters” and that “there were no dinosaurs” and all such ignorant fucking NEO MEDIEVALIST bullshit.
My Father, a Pan African Militant, who also pretended to be an Animist, often referred to “The Struggle” but he never specified. There were struggles at home, struggles in the home of his childhood, struggles between factions represented at the revolutionary meetings he attended and struggles in his mind and in his body. Maybe when he said “The struggle continues…” he was thinking of me. I’m now 7 years older than my emphysematic Father ever got. If he appeared to me now I could lecture him. I could smirk at some of his assertions.
In retrospect, I look at my Father, in his wildly-teased and effortful pseudo-‘Fro, Jesus sandals, white trousers, Dashiki, hand-carved mojo necklace and aviator shades, whistling a jazz tune as he unlocks the driver-side door of his ’68 Mercury Cougar, sizzling in the savage Vegas sun, and I think: this man is not a bad person but he isn’t right, either.
What is/was he?
Years after the setting of that retroactive half-epiphany, I slept with a buxom, sweet-smiling, girl, in college, whose unusually elderly father had been a confidante of Marshal Tito’s. She clamped my narrow brown hips between her strong white legs and held on for dear life, crushing the wind out of me. She considered her father a great man from a great age. The smell of the hand cream she used on her tan-lined breasts sticks with me to this day. After ejaculating in S., I rarely had questions about either of our Fathers or anything else. An orgasm is natural punctuation and the end-goal of a tiny local quest.
I nearly wrote, just now, idealistically, “An orgasm should be a starting-point,” until remembering that an orgasm was the starting point for almost all of us.
.
6
APPARATUS
—a short story
a) My father was a racist, cigar-chomping, wife-beating son of a wife-beater. He was also charming, well-educated and handsome. He looked like Sal Mineo with a buzz cut. He was a scientist who worked for the government. Because we lived in Vegas in the ’70s, out near the air force base, I assumed his specialty was bombs.
b) When I was very little I loved my father and I wanted his approval. When I got a little older, I hated him but I still wanted his approval. It wasn’t until I had grown up into a way of Life that made reconciliation impossible that I finally stopped wanting his approval. It took quite some time.
c) When did I stop loving my father? I’m not sure. It was a gradual thing. The first time I saw him slap my mother during an argument was a shock, but I didn’t stop loving him. I assumed she deserved it, the way I deserved it when he spanked me for drawing on the living room wall. The second time I saw him do it was not long after the first. And that time I was sure my mother didn’t deserve it. I must have been seven or eight. My father came home late from a long day at work, without calling first, and dinner wasn’t ready. Slap.
d) It wasn’t until I was 16 that I started hating him. I know the exact day and even the hour. It was 1972. It was my 16th birthday. He took me to a brothel called The Plantation. Way out on the Tonopah Highway. I had no idea where we were going. Was he going to kill me and bury me in the desert? He had booze on his breath and the kind of smile you see on someone’s face when they think you’re getting what you deserve.
e) We pulled into the parking lot of The Plantation and my father said to me, “Now we get to see if the apparatus works.”
f) The Plantation specialized in light-skinned Black girls. My father and I were sitting on a long black leather couch in what looked like somebody’s den, with framed posters of NFL superstars on the walls. There was a wet bar in the corner of the room and a radio playing Hey Jude by the Beatles. My father ordered a drink and offered to buy me one, too. I politely said no thank you but my mouth was dry.
g) A barefoot light-skinned Black girl, wearing a fluffy Afro, in a red silk bathrobe with oriental patterns on it, came out into the waiting room and introduced herself as “Freddy” and took me by the hand. My father made some kind of joke that I didn’t quite hear or I can’t remember as I followed Freddy down the hall to an austere bedroom with a framed American flag on one wall and a framed Alfred E. Neuman dollar on another. My face was on fire.
h) When I took my pants off I was shaking. Freddy was laughing and she clapped her hands, stooping forward, and her robe fell open and her pointed breasts danced. She said, “You bend to the left and your father bends to the right!”
i) Impotent ever since.
7
YouTube Comment thread comment for Come Saturday morning-The Sandpipers-1969 (for “The Sterile Cuckoo”)
I can remember being in sniper school in Vietnam in 1970, and every time this song came on the radio from AFVN, all firing on the rifle range would cease, and we’d listen to this song, only to go back about our business after it finished. Strange how a song can trigger memories and take you back in time.—Ed Grant
8
Will Self
On the Kardashians – Will Self
9
BEATRICE VON B.-a mini memoir
I first saw Beatrice Von B. in the trendy nightclub I had worked in for about a year (1991-1992) and subsequently patronized four nights a week. No drink or drugs for me but The Girls! The Girls….! The club opened at midnight and there were lines around the block. A feller who later became one of Germany’s biggest movie stars, Benno Fürmann, was a doorman (and I later stole an object of desire from him: “Steven, man, I’ve been trying to go out with her for a year! How did you do it?”… that was pre-fame, of course).
One Thursday I was on the dance floor with someone or other and this extremely cute girl-woman (of about 22) made eye contact, deployed a few somewhat corny, yet highly seductive, Mata Hari dance moves (skimming her hands over the contours of her hips and bosoms with splayed fingers as though choreographed by Bob Fosse), put an embarrassing lump in my pants, got my pre-cell-phone phone number out of me and split. What separated Beatrice from many of this club’s sexy-but-dodgy denizens was her relatively high IQ. She was at Uni studying science journalism. Her father served on the mysterious, powerful and ill-fated “Treuhandanstalt”. Being married to a member of the prestigious Treuhand had been an intoxicating elevation of status, for the mother of foxy Beatrice, until the shit hit the fan.
“There is a medieval castle that once belonged to my family,” said Beatrice, the sun animating her lustrous hair, on a walk. She had a delightful but peculiar way of laughing, as though she was operating the mechanisms of her face and voice, from a melancholy distance, while doing it.
We went on a few dates and enjoyed the quippy verbal ballet of mutual seduction. I had been in Berlin for 2 years at that point and had picked up on the sense that Berlin’s battle-hardened army of seductresses don’t like “soft eggs,” as they call them, so I learned to cultivate a usefully unbothered, even fraudulently solipsistic, edge. The really attractive girls wanted only to fuck the men so dominant that fucking them, for these men, would be no-big-deal, so I learned to present such an attitude, but the distracted-poet version rather than the crude and violent brand. Being born in ’59 I was influenced, very slightly, by the imagery of the Flower Children but I was influenced, as well, by my dick. I had already perfected a lighter version of this hybrid courting persona in the US, where I fucked more than my fair share of certifiably (ambiguity here deliberate) beautiful girls.
Never has a penniless man with no apparent future, during peacetime, fucked as many beautiful girls, using no aphrodisiacal drugs, hypnosis, lies or alcohol. With the caveat that I did not want to fuck anyone on a first or second date; I have never had (or desired) a one-night-stand; I’ve always needed to ease into it; I needed to like and want something other than the looks. Some connection, some camaraderie, in a way, and access to hidden treasures. I can enjoy merely looking at total strangers (my idea of good Porn is a fashion show’s deeply décolletéd runway) but my erect penis needs more to go on than what the eyes can deliver. It was never, for me, all about the “hunt” or the notches on the bedpost. I guess you could call Sex the space where my sense of poetry, and my actual physiology, overlap.
It wasn’t until two years later, in 1994, when I had a passionate affair, with a former SS Officer’s daughter (he’d been in his 60s when she was born), a pewter-blonde Valkyrie of 6′ 2″ tall, a Bond girl villainess, her tits bigger than my head and her legs longer than any legs I’d ever seen, that I realized that my sex life had become a kind of colloquium, titled ALL THESE FATHERS, with all these Fathers, including mine.
[sidebar: On the other hand, an old friend recently sent a well-written account of an affair he had, at the turn of the century, with an unhinged academic “Progressive,” an account that had me laughing out loud and spinning in my office chair, and I realized that his Berlin-based Sex Memoirs are better than mine, on the level of exuberant porn, because he did not hesitate to plug his twanging dick into the Zeitgeist’s socket. My fear of STDs and collateral fetuses really kicked in, as I left the US, because, back in the US, I was fucking, with great pleasure, a rotating, and/or interlocking, roster of Women I’d known very well, for years, and was therefore rather less careful with my penis then. I therefore have better, harder-core stories to tell about my pre-Europe period, 1977-1990: anal, many and varied threesomes, whatever. This old friend writes of being offered bareback anal sex, with a long-legged expatress, in the year 2000, as a reward for expertly editing a manuscript. How can I top that? In any case: all of these stories will feel increasingly like Sci Fi as the Social Media Culture grows increasingly censorious toward The Male Gaze and its after-effects.]
Beatrice had a boyfriend, a cipher with a beige Mercedes and not much chin. The kind of fellow lots of Berlin’s Club Talent would hang onto, as an insurance policy, to make a “good marriage” with, possibly, in the future, while being attracted to rather more dashing (or irredeemable?) types in the Disco.
We strolled in the Gay part of the district of Schöneberg with ice cream cones and I said “We’re speaking English because your English is one hundred times better than my German. And this is so because Germany lost the war. And if Germany hadn’t lost the war there is no way in Hell I’d be strolling up this street with an ice cream cone. With you or anybody else.”
“You’re pretty cute,” she said; I’m sure she assumed that she was the intellectual powerhouse between us (a German trait) and I’m sure she wasn’t. That’s the only conversation I remember in detail, though we had a few. As a journalistic student of science-writing she was worried about gene-splicing technology and I was worried about surveillance tech. I remember that much. We were both right. Now one of us is wrong.
[sidebar: Ironically, I found Beatrice Von B c. 2013 and added her to my FACEBOOT friends. I had to un-friend her late in 2020, owing to her enthusiastic support of the untested voodoo of the gene-fucking jabs they subsequently crippled and/or killed quite a few people with, including an old friend… Ed Ward… and my mother-in-law, whom I never much cared for, the old Stasi bat, R.I.P..]
The first time I visited Beatrice Von B., after a couple of weeks of hanging out, at her little flat, on Eylauer Strasse, we chatted, sipped tea and lip-locked until she felt moved to unbuckle my piratical pants. The kissing had got me painfully hard so when she fished the thing out it sprang to her face like a Jack-In-The-Box. At which incredibly-inopportune moment there came a knocking on the door.
“Beatrice!” a weedy male voice called out. “Beatrice!”
[sidebar: Whenever I use the wordy “weedy,” to describe a specific type of male, I picture Patty Hearst’s ex-boyfriend, Steven Weed, a sort of bio-cultural archetype].
“Oh, it is my boyfriend! “ she whispered, not particularly bothered. She winked and assured me that her boyfriend didn’t have a key to the flat and that, in any case, he wasn’t a very big man and she lowered her mouth upon my cock. I pulled the wet cock out by gently lifting her head as Steven We… I mean, Andreas… banged the door. I hurriedly re-packaged myself and zipped up and stood to the side of her window, overlooking the street, waiting for the poor fuck to stop banging and leave the building and drive off in his beige Mercedes. Berlin’s strange dearth of domestic rear-exists struck me as especially problematic, in a city of cheaters, at that moment.
I wasn’t afraid of her boyfriend; I could’ve mopped the floor with him while strapped in a rusty wheelchair with a pie in my face. But I was in the wrong, I felt, and I just couldn’t face arguing with someone while knowing I was the asshole. On the other hand, I was constitutionally unable to apologize for having been seduced by his fetching girlfriend. Beatrice was terribly disappointed when I slipped out of her flat and down the stairs but we arranged to meet again.
Later that week we fucked (well, to be honest, as I say, I kept it at the oral level) in a horrible borrowed flat in Kreuzberg, Berlin’s Turkish ghetto. The flat belonged to a girlfriend’s friend. The toilet was clogged and the bedroom window looked out upon the soot-blackened, windowless brick walls of a Kafkaesque courtyard. I took a picture of that view, before there were commercially-available digital cameras, and went to the trouble of taking that roll of film, to have it developed at a Drug Store, the view was so picturesquely bleak.
The particularizing detail of that encounter, beyond Kafka, and her mod beauty, was the way Beatrice’s nostrils flared before mouth-to-penis contact. She paused for a moment, her nose hovering, like a fine-tuned French gourmet contemplating a freshly unearthed truffle. I still haven’t decided the ratio of sexy-to-funny in that memory, or what B. was trying to tell me, about herself, by pantomiming that strangely Clouseau-like tableau. She sucked me as I reclined on gypsy mounds of pillows and duvets. I convulsed and came with a groan and we changed positions as I dutifully licked her neatly-trimmed kootchie while holding an internal monologue of great depth. She eventually came to accept the proffered orgasm. I then sat beside her and we kissed while I masturbated and I came again, one of those stringent ecstasies I imagine you get while serving in the French Foreign Legion, wringing a desert-desiccated dick of its last drops, exhausted, not entirely thrilled to hear her announce “I want to come again, too!”
The following week we made a second attempt at doing it in her flat.
And again came the boyfriend’s almost cosmically-inopportune, and theatrical, knocking and the “Beatrice! Beatrice! Open up!” a mere 30 seconds after the tambourine-shake of the dropping of my trousers.
At which point the penny finally dropped.
Her boyfriend was a “cuck” and they were doing it on purpose. I suppose they had arranged to fuck, together, after my pre-fucking of Beatrice, to get her ready for him. I wanted no part of that caper. I didn’t want to be any weedy German’s ethnic prosthetic super-cock.
[sidebar: I’m not freak-big but it’s eight point five inches long and thick as a farmhand’s lunch-wurst and therefore in the top percentiles of planetary sapiens cock sizes. I often wonder if big cocks don’t generate bigger orgasms for their owners (more nerve-endings, on a greater surface-area, tied to more receptors in the brain), leading to a slightly-more-energetic attachment to, and pursuit of, Sex? I’ve known quite a few Het men who struck me as weakly-motivated. Whether that would be down to self-consciousness about the inadequate presentation upon disrobing or, as I suspect, a question of scaled-down circuitry, I’m not sure. I suppose there are pros and cons to each respective condition of dick size but in the age of American gigantism, as it spreads across the globe, the bigger dicks are blessed until, of course, the Soy Boy Revolution is complete. Though even big-dicked Trannies remain in demand.]
A few months later I was dancing again, at that famous club, with my first wife (notice how I skipped all that exposition, early on, about being married to a deranged model-type before I met and married my Beloved second real Wife?), to whom I had told the story of “B and The Cuck,” and there they were, B and the Cuck, noted conspirators, dancing toward and then beside us. The Cuck’s eyes wide, his tiny hopes up. He looked like a young-ish Donald Pleasance wearing a flat cap. He could just “see” (and taste) a foursome looming. But, ah, no… my first wife (taller than any of us in her heels) was magnificently bitchy, at the best of times, and she spun in her silver dress and marched off the dance floor with rolling eyes and a curling lip and she left me there shrugging.
What, after all, does proper etiquette indicate?
10
The obvious advantage of a
crazy scheme is that anyone
exposing the scheme sounds
crazy.
11
“Tubman underwent brain surgery in 1898 and chose not to receive anesthesia during the procedure. When Tubman was a child, an overseer hit her in the head with a heavy weight after she refused to restrain a field hand who had left his plantation without permission.”
—The Internet Does American History
12
Already I sensed that a new kind of popular culture was emerging that played on the latent psychopathy of its audiences, and in fact needed to elicit that strain of psychopathy if it was to work. The modern movement had demonstrated this from its start, in the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, and the willing engagement of the audience’s own psychopathy is almost a definition of modernism as a whole. But this was strongly denied by F. R. Leavis and his notion of the novel as a moral criticism of life.
—-JG Ballard
We are children. Our entertainments and preoccupations (if that’s not redundant) are childish. Advertising/education/ administrative authority addresses us in the softened, encouragingly patronizing tone of adults addressing pre-schoolers.
Most of our “beliefs” are primitive superstitions. Astrology, Guardian Angels, Numerology, Sympathetic non-Psychopathic Government, The Law of Attraction, Jesus-Allah-Satan, Santa, Captain America, David Bowie…
12.5
THE LONG WALK TO THE SUPREME BEAN
—a short story
My father beckoned to me.
I saw the unexpected flurry of movement, the beckoning, over the blur of the top edge of the book I was reading, the book I was reading to pass the time, to pass the time as my father stared at the ceiling, dying, and I thought: this is it. I put my treasured copy of that book down upon its open face like an elegantly subdued assailant. I stood, even as I stooped, to move my ear to my father’s lips, approaching him with trepidation. I felt this might be the end and also I feared that his odor would prove to be haunting. I wanted to remember my father’s odor as it had been. The olfactory sting of freshly-shined shoes like his jet-black hair; the seafaring aftershave; the mint-crisp dollar bills he fluttered like a Geisha’s fan when I was coming of age. His dry upper lip neared my ear lobe and the static-gap was sparked by a surprisingly powerful discharge.
“It’s all one company,” he said.
“Say again?”
“It’s all one…,” he said, “… company,” he said, again, as I held my breath. He inhaled sharply and exhaled deeply, closing his eyes very slowly, as if the lowering of those massive lids / was crushing residual dregs of / bad breath out of him. At least one molecule of which had been there from birth.
I stood up and back from the bed and realized how loud his wheezing had been in the throbbing silence of the wheezing’s sudden absence. I stood.
I stood there in the middle of an emptied room.
I marvelled that I had made it this far through Life having never been slapped by a woman.
I thought: it’s not every day your father dies. What can I do to honor this space, this moment, this suddenly-altered social moment?
“You’re here but you’re not,” I said quietly, cautiously, respectfully at first.
“You’re here but you’re not,” I repeated, more forcefully.
The fifth time I said it there were bangs on the and floor and ceiling.
The long walk to The Supreme Bean was a strange one.
What an impertinently cheerful and warming spring day.
My phone rang in the snaking queue. I wondered how many people in the line had dead fathers? We formed, together, but very passively, unconsciously, I alone knowingly, this one-off, this Dead Fathers Club. Most of the members of this club, called to order by the scent of coffee, or muffins, were not, I noticed, terribly attractive. I wondered if their fathers had mocked their water-erect genitals at a plastic-pool party, given by an attractive Mexican family, when they were four. I thought the word not-superunprepossessing and answered my phone, turning my back to the woman in front of me, which caused me to turn my front to the man behind me, so I shielded my eyes with my free hand and did a two-step indicating the temporary nature of my imposition on the sovereignty of his personal queue-space.
“Where are you?” I whispered.
“Hospital,” she said. “Lacerations.”
“Decaf tall latte,” I said, switching to a confident public ordering-voice, adding, in a return to people-who-fuck-you whispers, “Let me call you back.”
If I told her about my father’s death, and the one last molecule lingering since birth, she’d think I was undervaluing her story about lacerations. If I didn’t tell her, on the other hand, she’d think I had something to hide.
Also: Lacerations of her hands, neck, breasts, face, buttocks or thighs? Have you ever been presented with the absolutely barest amount of information sufficient to generate an emotional response?
THE IMPERIALIST 