Gog and Ma Gog

 avec La Chasse spirituelle (part 1)

A book fair, an opening of an art exhibition. An ageless hippie sits on a podium, clutching a wireless microphone. It is Patti Smith. A banner hangs overhead, boasting:

MAKING VULGAR CHIC AGAIN

Lust at First Sight

SMITH: Every time I'm coming down with the stomach flu, I use the social media. I kneel in front of the toilet seat and talk to it. No, seriously. That's what internet and virtual reality, whatever, means to me: a drain, a place where to place your vomit.

I wrote a preface to the English translation of Une saison en enfer, the best or second best work by my favorite pet, Arthur Rimbaud. In it I said,

The alchemist must descend within himself, a journey more terrifying than trudging the White Pass or scaling the immense, tragic cliffs of Butane.

Yes, butane. You know the gas that they use in lighters?

No, I don't use it much. I need life around me, events. Things happening. Which reminds me. I must take my medicine. I fell in love with a boy at the pharmacy, and subconsciously... fuck it, on purpose, lost all my pills. So I can go back, and ask him out for a cup of coffee.

Do you think he'll come? Go? Oh no? Oh no!

Too bad, then. But you won't be able to say I didn't try.

You see, that's the problem with the internet. Can't fall in love on the internet, no matter what you say. Say it German, in Deutsch. Say NEIN, MEIN FRÄULEIN. Say it German. Please, I need to hear something on your beautiful language. Come on! Light my fire.

A city where multiple tongues flourish in flames is a city of God. Like Frankfurt. I like Frankfurt a lot. I love Fatih Akin. He's from Hamburg? Well, what the hell? We're all Americans here. I believe Fassbinder said that. Not Fassbender, whom I'm sure you guys know a lot better than I do... well. Alright.

That was the introduction. Which is followed by the world premiere of the lost masterpiece of Arthur Rimbaud, La Chasse spirituelle, dramatized by me, Patti Smith.

Dear friends. And lovers... friends: we have assembled around this ancient and insane pastime to propagate our lust for life and seek justification for our pathetic day-to-day existence. As drivel. As Goo... Gog? Mother of Gog thou aren't in heaven, as Bolaño put it. Or did he? Nobody knows but me. Feel free to laugh whenever you find it impossible to endure otherwise. My English has gone the way of all flesh these days... Why? I'm writing a play in Finnish at the moment. About my visit to the Dock of the Dead. No duck. "Laituri" in Finnish: duck. So, I'm gonna switch to the Tongue of the Dead now, if you don't mind, and if you do, I'm gonna do it anyways. You have your Dada Translators and whatnot, all the gimmicks of the Evil Empire. So fuck it. I'm the Priestess of Punk. I do whatever I want!

Robert said to me... Mapplethorpe, that is. He said, Robert said, "The purpose of Art is not to create more divisions in this world, but to annihilate the ones that exist, some a them at least. There are too many," he said, "too many." He was so naïve, my Robert was. That was a splinter of genius, his charm. The man-child who was also the Devil at times. Or a Demon, to be more specific. That's what he was, a Demon Child. You can quote me on that.

The epitome of protestant ethics, which Robert knew zilch about, the crooked Catholic that he was, the bottom is: feeling guilty about not being reckless enough. Another thing Robert didn't have to worry about. But I do. Pathetic, beyond help. A pariah. A leper, patient with HIV.

She takes a revolver from her coat pocket, puts the barrel to her temple.

No pharmacy boy shall want any part of this.

Ask the ones who truly know me, and they say that I have two virtues which stand out from the whole mess.

I'm a caring and devoted mother. To Gog. No, seriously... and?

There is no other. There is none! That was two. One, two.

She laughs, lowering the revolver.

I never read anything where anybody talked about my sense of humor.

Why is that? 

We have gathered around this ancient and insane crossword puzzle to escape the swarming wisdom of the streets. Wrong address, I'm so sorry. This ain't it, Jim. Follow him down.

Sings.

Suomessa olen minä syntynyt,
tuolla kauniissa Karjalassa.

Like that great Finnish pet Pentti Saarikoski, my latest discovery. My boy. My gog. Like one in the artery.

She recites the rest of the stanza.

Sinisen järven rannalla,
tuolla majassa matalassa.

You're supposed to repeat the last two lines of each stanza, but I don't have time for that now.

Raising the revolver.

I have some pressing matters to address. 

Lights fade out. A video starts to roll. Smith speaks from the dark.

Everything's an introduction. Remember that! The world is an introduction!

Descent into the Inferno


~

We have killed those who are upon the earth. Let us now kill those who are In the sky and they would throw their arrows towards the sky and the arrows would return to them besmeared with blood. And in the narration of Ibn Hujr (the words are): "I have sent such persons (Gog and Magog) that none would dare fight against them."

http://sunnah.com/urn/270160

To be continued.

Fiddle in the Flames

1

The was something rotting within this story right from the start.

Sohni is a mythical hero of the Estonians, also known by the name of Kalevipoeg, which the character shares with the national epic of the country. It so happens that Sohni is also the name of a Finnish newspaper, which has flatly refused to grow up. I proposed to the editor to adjust to the times a little, change the name to the lot sexier Oscar, but he just stared at me funny.

He does that plenty these days.

In the board of Sohni, a slightly surprising alliance between the old money and the green left has been forged. Forget the sour expressions on the owners' faces at the press conference - that's PR, and everybody knows it. These creeps couldn't take a crap without the treehuggers holding their hand. You could call it a relationship of mutually relinquishing oblivion. Every attempt at saying anything at all gets one in the back of the head before even drawing its first breath. One after the other... it's like spinning a coin with heads on both sides. Slowly you start questioning your own eyes.

The past is the present: this reflects the ethics of our grand majority. This country has returned to the acute anxieties of the Oedipal phase, and stays put. Our press dug the trenches. They are also in charge of entertaining the troops. That is something they know how to do, you have to give them that. 

One thing about a self-censorship like that is, you're learning to write as you circumvent it.

Ballroom Days Are Over

   

All of this is shameful, but especially that a full-time daycare worker can only afford to live in a shelter in NYC http://t.co/3JNLYRZCSK
— Jessica Grose (@JessGrose) July 24, 2013

It was a party night for the personnel. We were going to a show and dinner afterwards. One of the babes who kept me somewhat sane during their stay at the prison suggested we go for a drink before hitting the theater. Did I agree! The other nurse would come as well, although she'd called in sick the day before. Anyway, it was Saturday, and nobody remembered Friday any more.

The place we worked at was a horror show. Our boss was a pathological liar, we just didn't know it yet. All we saw then was her obsession to cover up for the lady who wore the pants in the house: a 3oo-pound hippo with bleached hair that could have been a wig for all we knew, it never changed. Also, the happy hippo had an iron determination to bully everyone into line, via tears. She was the vice president of the place, emphasis on the first part of the title. She was the spitting image of Carla del Ponte, squared.

http://www.amazon.com/Safe-Areas-monologue-two-acts/dp/1490925821/

I had a date with two pretty women: one blonde, the other a brunette of late. They weren't just pretty, they were smart and funny. And married, naturally. I met with the blonde at the bus terminal. We waited for the brunette. That's when the evening took a morbid turn.

All the aging fatsos from work had decided on the same thing  we had. They rolled down the corridor of the terminal, saw us - no use in trying to hide any more. By the time the brunette showed up, a herd of tipsy women were yelling and giggling, drowning all hope of a peaceful moment with their sideshow.

So, the script was stepped on into a slimy pulp. I was recast in a role of a Cowboy Moses. Earlier, I had wished I could take the babes to a certain bar. Now the domestic animals just had to follow - or choose a place that suited their refined tastes better. I prayed for the latter.

I tried to shake the crowd on the way. They stayed. We all entered a watering hole on Fredrikinkatu.

"Is this, like, your regular haunt?" the hippo wailed, scanning the images of deceased rock stars on the wall.

"Yup," I answered. "Sort of."

She twisted her freshly painted lips of screaming red some. A hint of  the hippo smile, an endangered species unto itself. "Well," she said. "It figures."

The brunette had positioned herself in front of the jukebox. I dashed after her.

"The best jukebox in town," I said. "What are you looking for?"

We sat down under a framed photograph of Gram Parsons and Keith Richards stoned somewhere in Southern France, with Mick Jagger sulking in the corner. Even old Mick looked a bit like our hippo in that photo. We had left the Elders near the bar. I put a song of Motörhead on just to drive them out.

I took the photo from the wall and told the ladies about it. They wondered if I was allowed to do that, take the pic from the wall.

"Oh yeah," I replied, "I've done it a 100 times."

Sometimes, looking back, you see a moment of perfect harmony, when all is well. When, if all your wishes came true, you would add nothing to the moment. That scene with the blonde and the brunette, Gram and Keith in my hands, was it for me. The best moment in the 10 years I worked as a middle manager in that torture chamber they called a daycare center. That was it. There is nothing more to tell, really.

I put the picture back on the wall. Later on, it was stolen or thrown away. Anyway, it was nowhere to be found as the bar moved into a new address on Annankatu. Soon after, I stopped visiting that bar, and after that, any bar, altogether. There was no point to it any more.

Street Art

en route to Boulevard Haussman

A hepcat asked if I could kindly spare a cigarette. When he saw what I had to offer, he spat out, "Gitanes?" And for a second he became an animated, French version of Bartleby the Scrivener reincarnated some hundred years later here, on sweltering Rue d'Amsterdam.

I couldn't help but join a grinning game with him. We smiled so hard the sun was disarmed for a moment there. Then, as obligations caught me, I returned inside.

My daughter wanted to do some shopping, and somehow we drifted into Clichy. She wanted to see Moulin Rouge anyway, and I knew exactly how to get there... thanks to Jean Rhys.

From the balcony Marya could see one side of the Place Blanche. Opposite, the Rue Lepic mounted upwards to the rustic heights of Montmartre. It was astonishing how significant, coherent and understandable it all became after a glass of wine on an empty stomach.

We took the obligatory pictures, then continued climbing Rue Lepic. I showed my daughter the building the main character in Quartet had lived in with her husband. Always in trouble with the patronne of the hotel. Always the cause of one scandal or another, without even knowing what she had done. Until Ford Madox Ford and missus came to the rescue, and the scandal erupted for real. I didn't tell my daughter that. I told her van Gogh had lived on Rue Lepic as well, I just didn't know where.

We bought some brie and crackers and a jug of ice cream (a touch of genius, that ice cream was, not my idea of course), and sat to eat on a bench where I thought Rue Lepic terminated. We ate most of the cheese, some crackers and all of the ice cream, sitting on a bench in a clearing, and eavesdropped an American hipster making fun of the local hipsters. He called them bonbons [probably bohos] or something, describing how cool they felt, living in Paris, throwing the weight of their parents' bank account around.

The guide was in his twenties or thirties. He was slim, had a short-cropped beard of gold and/or copper, the usual H-attire of jeans and shirt. He let his listeners in on a secret: just around the corner, right over there, you found an excellent restaurant with quite reasonable prices, big portions, huge salads, so on. The business side being taken care of, he then came down heavy with the artsy.

He told a story of a female artist who started painting her self-portraits everywhere to get back to an ex-boyfriend. "I don't wanna see you ever again," he had said. Now, of course, he had to. His ex-girl got incredibly rich and famous. There was a work of hers on the outside door of a gallery:

http://parisdansmonoeilen.weebly.com/miss-tic.html

To cut a long story short, she had realized the American Dream. As street artists go, she was a perfect match for tourist groups.

Then the guide said, "Well, other artists have lived here as well, and next we are going to see where one the most famous of them all, ever, lived."

The group ran away. I watched them go. They disappeared from view. I shot up from the bench, the spoon in my hand, and into the middle of the street to see where the group had gone. There. I saw them all right.

"There's got to be a plaque or something," I told my daughter. "I've to go and see, once they're gone."

While we were waiting for the first group to get out of the way, another group stopped in the same spot their predecessors had occupied, and another guide recounted the same stories, in another language, as far as I bothered to listen. I wondered out loud, why to tell the same stuff to everyone. Didn't they have any imagination? Didn't they ever get bored? Am I the only one who is always getting bored, besides King Arthur?

After a beat, we followed the tracks of the first group. There was no sign on the wall where they had stood, watching the van Gogh wannabe wave his arms. There was a Asian café downstairs, that was all. It must have been here anyway, I thought, staring at the derelict building. My daughter tapped me on the shoulder. She pointed to the other side of the street. And indeed, there were our friends of Group #2, standing in front of a carefully preserved white house, under that great, liberating plaque which said,

You shall know the truth; and the truth shall make you free.

We climbed on. And Jean Rhys wrote on.

The lights winking up at a pallid moon, the slender painted ladies, the wings of the Moulin Rouge, the smell of petrol and perfume and cooking.

The Place Blanche, Paris, Life itself. One realized all sorts of things. The value of an illusion, for instance, and that the shadow can be more important than the substance. All sorts of things.

On the road to Sacré-Coeur, to the steps of Sacré-Coeur, we take another break. My daughter asks me if I would like to live in Paris. I don't think so. It would be like living in a museum. This substantial remark is preceded or followed by a sermon of mine on the subject of writers and artists and hangers-on and yes-men and tourists who swarm the place as soon as somebody has achieved something of their own. Something original. It's the same as with the rock stars. People are just out to exploit them! Rock stars have nothing to do with it, my daughter insists. I insist that they do.

"But you have followed those stars here," my daughter says, "haven't you?"

Yeah. It is nice to visit those places, I explain. I'm not staying, feeding on dead people like a hyena.

Because I cannot stay. That is the only reason why not. It was at this point that my daughter asked if I wouldn't like to live in Paris. She gave me an opportunity to safe face. She must have seen that the old man's logic "was incorrect even before it reached its 'ergo':

It is wrong to say, 'I think'. One ought to say, 'I am thought'. [...]

I is somebody else."

Coming down the stairs, the vendors pass us, running away from the cops or the soldiers with their Kevlar vests and machine guns. They almost fall to their faces, the vendors do, they are laughing so hard. The audacity of hope? Once again I know nothing. I don't even know that. We take a metro to the hotel in silence.

"Lady Gaga," one of the vendors called to my daughter earlier, as he was trying to close a deal. "No need to be afraid."

He offered his hand, we hurried past.

"Where are you from?"

"Finland," I shot back, stumbling into safety. And after that, the vendors stumbled past us. After that...

Soon:

Who the hell is Haussmann?
Doesn't matter, really:
we want to be his protégés!

I'm a healthy student.

Graham Robb, Rimbaud. Picador, London 2000.

Mañana Republic

THE OTHER DAY I wrote about a Finnish journalist, Jussi Konttinen, calling him a Russophile. It's just about the worst thing you can say about a Finn, and I'm happy to say it again. This time, I have something to back it up with. Earlier, I'd read only one article by Konttinen: an FSB-enhanced propaganda bash about the Operation Storm, in which Croatia took the Krajina from the Serbs, and the subsequent trial of Ante Gotovina, who was in charge of said operation. Gotovina was acquitted at the Appeals Court of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), and Konttinen couldn't live with that. The Serbs had suffered so much! Already! Enough, he said. It had to stop.

True to his Zombie Marxist* ideology, Konttinen didn't wait for an unprecedented attack of creativity, as he went looking for the culprit. The Croats couldn't have achieved the acquittal by themselves. This had nothing to do with facts. You had to lay the blame on somebody bigger to preserve at least a shred of credibility... somebody a lot bigger than the four-million strong Croatia.

So, the United States had corrupted the ICTY, Konttinen wrote, extorting witnesses and bullying prosecutors and judges and just about everybody who had anything to do with the Gotovina trial.

Why, of course, Jussi. That wasn't enough, anyhow. Faithful to the Serb spirit he celebrates so vehemently, Konttinen launched another attack against the Croats just a week later. He writes for the Sunday edition, so he can't do this every day, as much as he wished.

Now the deputy chief of Croatia's Military Intelligence Agency had ordered his subordinates to spread dirt about the prosecution witnesses for the Gotovina case - all 113 [sic] of them, we were informed - the former Presidential candidate of Finland, Elisabeth Rehn, included!

We were, of course, dumbfounded as a nation. Elisabeth Rehn was the pride of Finland, the embodiment of a Swedish-style pathology, where every person and every nation is always equal, in war and peace, in innocence and in guilt. To stray from this trodden path was a gateway drug: at the end of that road lay a shotgun-toting beer-guzzling redneck from Texas or someplace, a member of the NRA, in short, an American. And, Herregud, we didn't want to wind up like THAT.

What caught my attention, however, in the midst of this superpower-sponsored conspiracy, was the fact that my outrageously irresponsible fabrication, that Slav Lover stamp on Jussi Konttinen's forehead, proved to be... like, accurate.

As my good friend and esteemed colleague S. Laurila has said:

Konttinen hates the Croats' guts, and worships the Russki... the Serbs as well, as a byproduct of that Slav fetish he has.

No. It can't be as simple as that.

Actually, it can. Read the latest effort by Konttinen, in which four pages of the Sunday edition of Helsingin Sanomat are trashed to shamelessly drool over Roman Rotenberg, a very rich Russian. And why? I'll be fucked if I know! Because Rotenberg bought a sports arena? Because Konttinen is gay?

No, sorry. That was uncalled for. My deepest apologies to all the LGBT people out there.

And the say the newspapers have fewer and fewer pages these days, because....

Let's just stop now, before I say something I'll regret. Lest I reveal that the Croats are Slavs, too. I suppose they wouldn't have much appreciation for Jussi's loving any more.


Being cock-happy** with the Slavs is no laughin' matter.

I want to make myself absolutely clear on this:
Nothing wrong in having the hots for Russian guys.
Masquerading that as journalism, there is.

Maybe I'm being harsh here. It must be hard to work your way up in the Putin Youth Network. They must have BOOT CAMPS.... Who knows what you have to do to become a member of the Nashi Press Corps? Konttinen does, but he won't tell.

His writings, then again, speak volumes about it, the cost of a little Nashi hazing to your brain and to your soul. They go bananas. You become a banana republic of one.

There's no known recovery for that yet. Scientist are working around the clock on five continents to find one. I don't think they will, in another 1 000 years or so. But, hey, we can always pray.

Mañana, maybe... Or, as the Muppets say it, "Mana Mana." Which was a Finnish Doom/Gloom band, but that's another story, and the singer killed himself.

Let's think some happy thoughts for a while, shall we?

"One question is..."

"One question, 'Who cares?'"  

"Oh. Okay."

"Maybe he'll buy our paper too, if you suck his set of pears some more!" 

"All right."

"Let's do it! You, I said, 'You.'"

[Man, I could write scenes like this all night, but it wouldn't be Good for me. So, buenas noches, everybody!]

Epiphany #1: The Sun and Srđ

________

*) I wrote a book about Zombie Marxism. You can buy it the cheapest here.

**) Found the word "cock-happy" on a delightful site, here.

HVALA VANCE OVEN:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNXtr7NwAio

Taxi Driver, Etc

The taxi driver grinning. Not a whisper
from the poet's house. The image is everything,
he hums, saving two bucks. Second hand flowers —

at Kylänevantie kaks. 

Safe Area for Candy Animals

A Strip Show by Matti Paasio

KARL BUILT is standing in a suit and a tie, a briefcase in hand.

As he begins to speak, an image from the Trnopolje concentration camp in Bosnia is projected behind him.

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