probabilityfields

We’re watching Sin City in a small dark room. I’m catching the drunks up on the parts of the story they miss in their periodic distractions, which frustrates me because I’m drunk and I’ve seen the movie before. In the middle of asking how a movie so visually beautiful can also be so ignorant of its political implications Zach walks in from the front porch frantic. He’s had a freshman girl hanging around him all night. The story was that he fucked her the night before, sounds sketchy already. Idiot.

They’d been talking on the porch for a while and at some point she announced her intent to kill herself. I’m incredulous. Zach’s scared, as he should be, and Daniel’s already on the phone with the SUPD. The house is always ready for drama.

So I go out to find her. I already feel like Clive Owen out to save some dame, which pisses me off, but I’m smarter than that. I find her outside of the Ruter Dormitory. I pull a square out my pack of Marborol No. 27s but forego my lighter. “Hey, do you have a lighter?” I say. Smooth huh?

She hands me the lighter and knows why I’m there, but she’s not running away. Good, she’s full of shit, some dumb freshman who gave it up too easy and now she’s crying for help, drama. But I tell Clive Owen, Mickey Rourke, and the Bruno to kiss my ass, she’s just a person, not a girl, bitch, dame, or whatever.

“No, it didn’t have anything to do with Zach,” she says. Whatever. “I’ve been sleeping for a really long time, I’ve gotten good at it.” Canned metaphor, but at least it’s sincere.

I’m not very smooth, not fatherly, not like Bruce Willis. I stutter and confess often that I don’t know what I’m talking about. “I’ve been there before…but I know that I can’t fully understand whatever it is you’re going through…I never could…I just–”

“I know, it was stupid that I said I was going to kill myself,” she admits early on in a way that makes me think that maybe she’s serious about killing herself.

She’s well read, starts talking about Albert Camus. She talks about “enlightenment,” but I forgive her because she’s young.

So I tell her the entire world is absurd, I mention the scene in Annie Hall where Woody Allen asks the happy couple how they account for it. The response:

Woman: I’m very shallow and empty and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say.
Man: And I’m exactly the same way.

I try to explain that it can seem that the world is full of either dumb happy people or smart depressed people, but that’s not true.

“Intelligent people are better off because–” but I’m cut off by the arrival of a cop on a golf cart.

The bastard asks her name and fixes his authoritarian gaze on her. He asks her to hop in and he’ll take her to her dorm. I disagree and ask to speak with him. He’s an asshole but agrees and I try to explain the possible emotional pain of being driven back to your dorm by the cops in your first week of school. He doesn’t back down, but calls two other cops to the scene. I talk to the female officer and we’re simpatico after a good chat with the girl who is now crying. They let me walk her home.

The conversation stayed the same, me assuring her that she’s too intelligent not to at least see it through. “You have to move past Holden Caufield,” I say, half-wanting to criticize his phoniness.

I have the feeling she’s bullshitting, but about what? Oh well, when we reach the door it’s no longer my responsibility. I wonder if I saved her life. No Clive, you could have been anyone.

1. We were born into a time different from any other. The Age of 24 Hours. News, music, Internet, reruns, porn. Spectacular images envelope us constantly. We receive them, but not without expressing some reluctance.
“Music today sucks!”
“Special effects suck!”
“MTV sucks!”
“I hate Brittney Spears!”
Though such sentiments are familiar the aforementioned cultural images remain ubiquitous. Thus a state of cognitive dissonance emerges in American culture.
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2. It is often said that the 1960s were the pinnacle of rock n’ roll. There are no more real screaming teenagers, not like those who screamed for the Beatles.

What followed were a series of wet dreams and masturbatory fantasies about an irretrievable Dionysian past. We are a marriage, founded on physical attraction and fantastic sex, souring in its latter days.
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3. Of course it did not end with the ’60s. Bowie, Reed, Iggy, punk rock, Springsteen, DIY, Kurt Cobain. And recently there’s been a resurgence of talent: the White Stripes, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Flaming Lips, Wilco, et al.

But rock critics, sapped and deprived, have become too aroused and have prematurely ejaculated. Impregnating readers with illusions of rock n’ roll’s salvation. The new music is exciting, but hardly more than a beginning.

The point is that irresponsible sensationalism, the immediate impulse to market (used here to mean the individual or journalist who is not employed nor paid to do so, but still behaves like an advertisement), slapping whatever comes down the pipe in a glossy patina, is like eating the seeds instead of cultivating a crop.
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4. The possibility of a new rock n’ roll is dim, and everybody knows it. But profiteers are happy to exhume the old casket and parade the corpse around the party like Weekend At Bernies. And the entire time you wonder Why the fuck doesn’t anyone notice that it’s dead?! shouldn’t there be a stench?!
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5. Rock n’ roll is wrong. It is exclusive, it keeps all those deemed “uncool” locked out. It privileges and glorifies the oversexed white male. It feasts on women. It robs blacks of their art. It is the rich man stealing the voice of the poor.
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6. Rock n’ roll is America. It is sex, the transcendental, drug-induced revelations, and a fist colliding with your teeth.

It is “the evangel-poem of comrades and of love.”
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To be continued as part of an ongoing series.

Hello everybody. This is the site formerly known as The Probability Fields. Unfortunately I got bored, stopped posting and neglected to renew my ownership of that particular domain name. So here I am at a new domain, tautologist.com.

tau·tol·o·gy (tô-t­­­­­ŏl’ә-jē)
n. pl. tau·tol·o·gies

1. Needless repetition of the same sense in different words; redundancy.

2. Logic. An empty or vacuous statement composed of simpler statements in a fashion that makes it logically true whether the simpler statements are factually true or false; for example, the statement Either it will rain tomorrow or it will not rain tomorrow.

I intend for this virtual space to house parts of my own consciousness that I wish to inflict upon others who haplessly wander here. I enjoy commenting on various topics revolving around the experience of human beings, such as myself, within the allegedly postmodern world.

I especially have a keen interest in philosophy, film, and rock n’ roll. I also possess an eccentric but amiable sense of humor, and if you ever saw me in person I’m sure you’d agree that I am uncommonly sexy.

So, enjoy what I have here, soon I’ll be posting pictures, links, maybe some music, and useless information like what I’ve been reading, movies I like, and stuff like that.