Saloon of the Despairado
I want to belong to a private club and spend my days lolling around in a big old chair. A man of the world belongs to things. He subscribes to magazines and sits on advisory boards and attends pot-luck functions, and he certainly pops in at the club a couple times a week for a drink. My club would have ugly carpeting and little upkeep. It would require a few utilitarian chairs and barstools, and one nice armchair that looks in worse shape than it is so nobody sits there. Other accoutrements: thick beer mugs, the requisite jar of pickled foodstuff, microwaveable pub grub, a bookshelf full of used dime-store social studies textbooks, roaring fireplace tended to by no one in particular. Over in the corner, an old man would push faded snooker balls around a table covered with ripped felt and water stains. The club would play no music, or at least nothing more than subtle cocktail-club fare, a piano tinkling a discreet medley all day. The white noise of chatter would prevail.
Members would share a single bond: the belief that civilization is doomed. There’s no political or business affiliation and no heredity. You show up because they know the world as you do, as a fiery ball of spiralling death waiting for someone to light the wick. Members share this trait and bond by it. What of it? Religious sects can form to discuss Rapture, can’t they? And so can I gain membership in a club to discuss our (humanity’s) silly world-changing hubris, how funny “ideas” are and how they really believe what’s coming out of their own mouths! The fireside chats have no trace of depression or hopelessness, no sour faces, just entropy and erudition and laughter and slaps on the back and a general understanding that it’s all for shit, and what are we doing here, anyway.
It could be called “Misanthropia”. How about “The Low Ebb”? “Downfall Lounge”? “Second Coming Café”? No. No. “Club Despair”. Yes.
The members are Marxists, Leninists, Trotskyists, Anarchists, Libertarians, Paleoconservatives, sexual deviants, doctrinaires, nihilists, professors, armchair intellectuals, Zoroastrians, and malcontents with senses of humour. As a shield against possible optimism, the owners guard memberships as if they were gold bars. Instead of a fee or cover charge, Club Despair asks for a critique of a random topic, with the expectation that you run it into the ground.
At the door, the entrance examination would go something like:
“Can art exist within the confines, forms, and constraints imposed by mass industry? Is the ensuing adulation of modern mass-art heroes an expression of our shared values, a complex manifestation of class forces, or a contrived feedback loop assembled by those who profit most from culture?”
“I reject the question!”
“On what grounds?”
“You have posed the question under the assumption that ‘art’ has any value to civilization at all, or even any demonstratable presence in it. Have you looked at this building we’re in? These cold slabs of concrete carved into a block and hollowed out with all the craftsmanship of a calculator performing square roots, into which citizens are shoved and told to experience “art”? You can paint the hallway burnt sienna and mitre-saw the wainscotting and hang goofy photographs of blood oranges all you like, but you’re living in a husk of a dwelling, designed and situated to suit the powers that be. Art has no way of oozing into the public sphere without being coated in the indelible slime of society’s values. Television, radio, print, film, music, and the Internet, all of these have trailing behind them the stink of opportunism, of managerial sophistry, of design by committee, with the audience’s approval and ensuing riches held in the locus of the creator’s mind. How’s the crowd in there tonight?”
“Good, good. Quiet night but it’s picking up. Is art, then, worthless? Or does it exist at all?”
“As soon as it is observed and sent into the churn of mass critical opinion it cannot properly be called ‘art’, though I believe most art is asphyxiated long before it reaches the public. As for your ‘questions’, once art is sold or converted into an item of extrinsic worth (viz. money) it begins to drift from the realm of intrinsic beauty. We assign it lots of sociological signifiers to make people feel they’re missing out, and the real art exists in the intricacy of the deception. The real basis for our society. Every American home should have a Norman Rockwell, right? Nothing but more product, another pile of chopped hamburger for you. It’s all for shit. Any drink specials tonight?”
“Jack Daniels is $2.50 in a mix or $2 for the shot. Oscar Wilde said, ‘all art is useless’, but he did not mean worthless. Surely art can coexist with money?”
“True, but what the public craves and pays for can scarcely be called ‘art’, since they are only interested in seeing reflections of themselves in it, or a statement of one’s place in the social order. All artlike things created en masse have worth only in relation to other artlike things, as a social currency in a society that is going straight—not with a detour through Limbo and then down, but absolutely dart-like straight—to Hell. I’m surprised the flames haven’t already begun licking at our heels.”
“You can check your coat at the counter on the left.”
“Thank you and good evening.”
Clearly this club makes good economic sense. While one contemplates the fate of humanity, what’s $4 for a drink? The club could send out a quarterly newsletter, The Modern Eschatologist, in which we are kept abreast of the latest world events clubbing humanity on its knee. Nobody takes it too seriously because one’s own mortality is hardly a parlour topic, like other people’s mortality. It’ll go slow at first but with these changing times let’s just say the horizon looks to be blazing-hot for Club Despair.
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Things Privately Done #54
This is a topic I’ve hinted at before but never expressed its true magnitude. I listen to really bad hip-hop music. The worst, awful, abominable. A trip through my “Hip Hop” playlist is an odyssey of poor taste. It starts at your standard gangsta rap canon, your NWAs and Wu-Tangs[1], drifts then like a plume of ponnie-weed into the higher spheres occupied by the Tribe, De La, and Hiero, and then without warning goes right off the rails, into songs—or sections—of my collection, whereupon you might feel compelled to ask where I went wrong in life.
Nobody’s talking Vanilla or Hammer. We’re talking second-album Onyx here. Third-album House of Pain. Boogiemonsters and Craig Mack. Mad Lion and DJ Yella, Bas Blasta and Originoo Gun Clappaz. There was a series of one-hit wonder rappers in the early 1990s, and I felt it necessary to own not only the hit album but all the followups. The kind of rap flocked to by teenage males of any age. Hell, I own the Flatlinerz album, and if they had made a second record I’d own that too. I play these ridiculous records for my friends, and while the songs start I explain a little backstory.
“Check out this intro. It says in the liner notes that the guy is screaming into a microphone stuffed inside a tennis ball can, to give it that real Splatterhouse Rock authenticity. The song should be placed in the context of the record’s leitmotif, which is the drift of a poor inner city male into a slovenly adulthood while never quite becoming a man, and the manifestation of that anxiety through a series of elaborate killings of, I quote, ‘chickenheads’, that purport to express his mature mind to the only ones with a window unto his grisly world: the local police, and the Korean shopkeeper on the corner.”
“Cool.”
“Track three is a paean to street defecation, but only the kind you do to get by. The bassline is a slowed-down sample from a Warren Zevon instrumental. The grunts at around 2:15 are real. We can fast-forward to them if you like.”
“Oh, uh, cool.”
“Splatterhouse Rock were fucking luminaries, man. These guys were highly influential on other acts like Deformity D, Cankerous Crew, Wormface, The Coagulators, and Scrunt. They’re all from the same area. Same shopkeeper and everything. His name’s Jaewa. He’ll sell them all firecrackers because their moms shop there too.”
These are times when I understand keenly that no two adolescences are alike. This music, as well as many of the genre conventions, could subjectively be called bad, and objectively as well. With every spin of the disc it becomes more apparent that bad music isn’t very good unless you’re alone, away from the critical ear. Away from objectivity, and the need to impress or self-justify. Some music is just good because you thought it was good before you knew anything. So I wait until everyone leaves and then open the laptop back up and blast that noise, because damn, it feels good to be a gangsta.
[1](including the solo efforts of all original members[2], as well as spinoffs including, but not limited to, Allah Mathematics, Killah Priest, Dreddy Kreuger, La the Darkman, and if I’m honest with myself, Shyheim the Rugged Child)
[2] this does not include Cappadonna, by any name
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