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HOLLYWOOD
ALPHABET
I
am an amateur alien living in Amityville
in a Batman costume, on leave from Babylon 5.
I can't tell a cat from a canary from a Wes Craven movie
from a
William Castle movie
yet I get déjà vu when I think of Philip K. Dick dancing with
Judge
Dredd after dancing with a wolf.
T.S. Eliot once said that ethnographic study offered a form
of
empowerment for Everyman–-that and exploitative
cinema.
Well maybe he didn't. I
guess he didn't say any female man
would be
bound to love falsetto, either;
that may have been William Gibson, or that writer on the
gothic
tradition whose name escapes me,
Jurgen Habermas and Donna Haraway. Hollywood, you see, is
more
about image appropriation than individuation–-
as such it's a Janus-faced town, a kind of Jurassic Park
where dinosaurs like Steven King, Freddy Krueger and Stanley
Kubrick
have gone extinct
quicker than you can say Herschell Gorden Lewis, or the
Legend
of Hell House.
Think of Madonna or Tank Girl, Russ Meyer, memory as a
prosthetic
device, think of Mr. Sardonicus or Edwin
Muybridge.
Think of those nights of the living dead called the Academy
Awards,
Or get over it–-
your paranoia about passivity, consumerism, your nostalgia
for the Quartermass
and the Pit movies (the time of
"serious"
SF!)
compared to your horror of Return of the Jedi. (Really, now.)
I for one am a Dorothy L. Sayers satire, or a satire of
Dorothy L.
Sayers–-or a way to say Sherlock Holmes in
a speech about
slasher flicks.
I am a text as an anti-therapeutic model, which is
different from
heroin chic and yoga-mania
though sort of the same, occupying a utopian middle ground
which means you won't see me written up in the Village
Voice,
but you could in a Paul Verhoeven movie (but only
in the video
edition
in the John Waters' director's cut version).
I was always that b-class, proto X-Files type,
the kind of person who'd fling an ancient coin at you and
yell
"Zotz!"
TEENAGE
CAVEMAN
OR, A B-CLASS MOVIE CONTAINING HISTORY
"The
old law has served us well for a long time"
says the head of the clan to the teenager in Teenage
Caveman
"and it will take time to change it."
The
teenage caveman stares suspiciously at the old man.
He wishes to cross the forbidden river
where gods of fire can kill a man by touch
and the earth devours cave people.
And
he does cross.
And he does discover:
a baby alligator with a fin pasted on its back
fighting with a gila monster
magnified 30 times by unknown deities
so that they appear as giants to the ignorant little cave
people.
He
does cross.
And he does discover
an old pilot in a burnt up radiation suit that looks like a
shiny black
rooster.
He does cross
And he does discover
a book with strange photos of the atomic war
that created the Stone Age these cave people have been bombed
back into.
"The
old law is over"
the teenage caveman announces,
"man will explore the lands beyond the lake of fire.
Man will meet up with other men."
Then
the narrator breaks in to explain that
these were our ancestors, and they built themselves up
from a radioactive wasteland
as had their ancestors before them
(clips of giant insects and mutants arising out of the sea)
and so on
until the history of the world appears before our eyes
like a 50s Dagwood sandwich
civilizations stacked, one upon another
on our daily bread of nuclear war.
"How
many times, o man, how many times!"
The
teenage caveman, played by a young Robert Vaughn,
walks off into a mushroom cloud
the way a cowboy would ride into a sunset.
He's heading for a new civilization too.
Or rather, a new job in a new time.
For
teenage caveman will grow up to by a spy in the 60s
named Napoleon Solo
and, as the star in The Man From
Uncle,
will fight the cold war in a whole new way.
HOW
TO KNOW HIGHER WORLDS
–-for Rael
“…if you do not even understand what words say,
how can you expect to pass judgment
on what words conceal?”
–-H.D.
woke
up too early this morning
but that was long ago
even
further back than that
watched pro football highlights
preceded by Emmanuelle: The Series
the
reaches of time become less reachable moving backward
still
yet I see a tree
with a star mist hairnet
no,
those are Italian Christmas lights
no, it’s summer
and those are fireflies
in
a tree?
well,
once remembered personal history is abandoned
one can’t be sure
what
you’re describing
could be when aliens landed
and inseminated the world with DNA
as recorded by your blindfolded mind
touching the elephant of actual events
don’t
feel bad
those previous to you
in the collapsing domino chain reaction of molecular cell
evolution
describe the same event
as the “descent of the Elohim”
which in biblical code means
“mighty
beings in flaming chariots
hauling ass out of the sky”
CONSTANT
COMMENT
The
porno star said he was getting “tea bagged”
by which he meant someone was licking his nuts–-
an experience he felt was illuminating
only the word he used was “warm.”
And
the viewer could not help but think of his own teabags
sitting peacefully in their warm box
waiting for a cup of hot water, followed by a dipping, a
stirring
sensation–-like a musical that slowly works you up
until
the end, where the two stars are dancing in fishnets
and straw hats
and canes
in front of a curtain with a spotlight on it
that looks like a golden moon
so that the audience can hardly catch its breath.
Poems
© Jerome Sala 2004. All rights reserved.
Jerome Sala's is
the author of such cult classics as Spaz Attack, I Am Not a
Juvenile Delinquent, and most recently, Raw Deal: New
and Selected Poems. His new book, Media Effects, is
due out in Fall 2004 from Soft Skull Press.
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