DVD night: "Amadeus" vs "Sweet Sweetback"

Everything happens for a reason. Everything that comes our way is won, right? Teach em up and kids get right after that intimacy with god or perfection of wisdom chasing like it’s the fucking milk truck and no one wants to end up with gold teeth. Eventually the wake grows so wide only image left in their mind is longing, for its path to find. How are you supposed to know searching for the purpose, searching out the design, just puts you further yearning for the goal, truth?

Root out perfection and there ye shall find god. In “Amadeus” Mozart swivels his baton like a superconductor channeling the Rex Fantastic. Nevermind that Wolfie himself is a giggling ninny besotted by his own desperation for a father’s favor; he sits at his billiard table composing dipping into the inkwell like it’s a reservoir of divine cues. Antonio Salieri would kill to soak up the holy precision, but only fills with narcotic craze that his lifelong study can’t make him a vessel transmitting heavenly melodies. The angels he hears are all blown off course, their wings caught by the storm of progress. But who’s flawless? Mozart’s dad masks himself like he’s ready to preside at an orgy, and scares the opera prodigy’s eyes tight shut. Wolfgang’s middle name is barely uttered in the script but “Amadeus” is Latin for god’s lover.

Music to Salieri is god in mathematical resonance, the lord whose billiard balls bounce just so, just as he determined to strike them. Mozart does not bring the fugal counterpoints that Bach does, but his harmonies sound with a precise beauty that confounds Salieri nonetheless. The Italian hungers and hunts and his empty hands are to the movie like silences that draw tension between notes. Mozart’s real scores are the recitative matching the conflict’s slow rhythm haunt for haunt. The soundtrack of course is brilliant. Breathless Salieri identifies: “And there an oboe, high and unwavering, until a clarinet takes over and forms a phrase of such … longing.”

But this plaintive superscribing woodwind sounds like—that sounds like jazz! The soaring clarinet of “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” runs along high like telephone wires, transmitting escape, branching all over the land. If the Christian God is a clockmaker the jazz god is a blacksmith. Not just for forging new sounds from European instruments and West Indian rhythms, but because his work is never done. He doesn’t wind up his pieces and send them on their way; he stands by the furnace: hammers and mends, shatters and bends. Jazz is variation and invention. Instead of perfect, jazz is exquisite—which means “well chosen.” “Sweetback” is a chase movie and, like Salieri, the cops just can’t find what they seek.

“You can’t get away on wings. But niggers got feet.” Sweetback runs all day and night, wiggling his own magic wand and attracting LAPD like a lightning rod, but all he channeling is Redd Foxx. The black man doesn’t have a father to worry about and he doesn’t look back. When he’s with a woman, she’s the one feeling full with god’s word. Progress in “Sweetback” is an excuse for the police, a murmur from angels. Sweetback gets on by getting off course. Deviation defeats progress. Flawless can’t beat lawless. Haunted and hounded, chased by sirens, Sweetback makes his own path and his own high notes. With the squealing horns and clarinets, he breaks out. He moves with his feet instead of his hands clutching after something. Sweetback’s route is not designed. It hasn’t time for perfection. It’s pounded out and left for detectives to find, puzzle over and pursue.

Is LeBron Like Ike?

Often my greatest fear is the lurking possibility that what I imagine about reality is false. Frequently it manifests as insecurity about girls. Occasionally it looms as the existential worry that the world is an utter illusion. The problem is a matter of communication. Do my senses and perceptions faithfully communicate a true interface with matter, and even more questionably, is there any way for me to be in touch verifiably with other personalities -- other people?

Inversely, I doubt I can make my own mind, my own identity and ideas, accessible to others. For the past few weeks I've been struggling to write an essay comparing Dwight Eisenhower to LeBron James the basketball star. My main problem was an oppressive concern over how to address the piece (analytically? aggressively?) in order to make the arguments plain and yet thorough, convincing. I also suffered a sneaking doubt about the validity of my theories, like some critical part wouldn't hold up, but it was more a matter of how to frame the thing. I was certain of my thesis and its constellation of minor observations but I seemed incapable of translating it verbally.

Basically, the idea went like this: Society's tendency to elevate leaders comes out of the same solipsistic terror. The moment a human identity emerges, that sensibility is carved from -- cut off from -- the interconnected particles and interrelations of the universe, because to identify is to separate. So to place someone ahead of others enables individuals to follow, to be a part of something and even to remove some of the responsibility and danger of acting independently. Just as important is to grant the leader some kind of lineage: an origin connected to the beginnings of all things, both to unite the individual with an ancestry connecting people together (as in evolutionary branches) and more subtly to make a link to a time when minds lacked self-consciousness and therefore lacked the dividing factor of identity. Eisenhower was the model, because his life represented a progression of leadership, a sort of validation or sign of anointment. Before being president of Columbia University, he was president of the U.S.; before that the spearhead of D-Day and Allied operations in Europe; long before that a football star at West Point. This follows religious and royal precedent that kings and prophets must be descended from earlier founding figures or their early life full of portent and auspice, and preferably both (hence Moses and the bulrushes, David defeating Goliath, Jesus' annunciation, etc). Some modern scholars believe most of these origin stories were invented to author the kind of authenticity described above. Well LeBron James entered the national scene as a junior in high school with a sports illustrated cover headlined "The Chosen One" and I intended to demonstrate a kind of Biblical search for prophecied savior (or, if you prefer, like the search for a child Lama) after a line of "false prophets" (Iverson, Kobe, etc.) anticipating a "next Jordan". Then a discussion of what might lie ahead for the young LeBron, considering the ostensibly portentous example of Eisenhower, himself once a young star athlete who went on to excel at every level. But the possibility of a President BronBron (one nickname is already King James) raises the question of what kind of figure would he be, and this is where it connects back to solipsism. My idea is that, especially given the illusory nature of these "ascendant descendant" mythologies, presumed leaders do not transgress the solipsistic barrier presented by identity unless they resist or even shatter (by a mechanism of fragmenting contradiction through rebellion) the structure that identifies them (as that leader). Obviously, Eisenhower was not that counterstructural figure. Could LeBron be? Not likely, but possibly… etc etc

Unfortunately for my essay, I discovered Eisenhower's athletic past was not as glorious as I thought I'd learned. Though impressive as an Army running back, young Ike broke his leg and ended his playing career midway through his only season. He wasn't exactly the LeBron James of his day. It doesn't obliterate the underlying philosophy which was really the subject of the writing and which I still stand by (in a certain sense, my belief in the non-true early-Eisenhower kind of bolsters the illusory-anointment idea), but it kind of makes the supposed connection silly. Indeed all I reinforced is that what I think may not be grounded in reality, and any attempt to communicate seems rife with clouds of doubt.

One Cannot be Faulted

no one shouldn't read this

it's not real and may seem somewhat silly but it's more or less an articulation of what i believe w/r/t symbols, connection, transit and reality. don't worry about understanding it. we can talk about that

Fine!!! Here!!! Enjoy.

Though there are many things you shouldn't do, at least don't do the following:

1. Let a near-zero checking account balance and general lack of money prevent you from feeling anything but guilt and self-pity. Do not let it prevent you from reading, writing or generally enjoying life. Remember, you're going to die. You are going to die. You will die.

2. Only after experiencing number one and receiving a large check you weren't expecting soon after, let that check be the thing that reaffirms your usual belief that life truly is grand and not quite the terrible lot you thought it only a day previous. Surely you're better than that. It should be something more mysterious and lovely.

3. Convince yourself after drinking three cups of coffee that coffee is all you need to be productive. Do not say, "It's because I haven't had coffee lately that I've left all my interests to themselves to stay important and viable in my life".

4. Unsuccessfully disguise a personal post as an advice column.

5. With number four said—listen too intently to me.