Make way, you fucks! We got us an all-timer, here!

Possession (1981)

There’s a grammar to cinema. Like the grammar to everything else it’s mostly obvious, proudly tedious, implemented by people who lack confidence in their ability to create anything of interest themselves and as a result are hellbent on ruining everyone’s fun and, worst of all, boring. I don’t want a movie that shows me the world through my own eyes. I see the world through my own eyes every day. It’s my default setting.

So it’s always a breath of (gory, weirdly-tentacled) air when a movie comes along that extremely, deliciously doesn’t give a fuck about the rules as they are currently understood. This elevation above the rolling seas of mediocrity can happen for any number of reasons, but in my estimation it’s most often done by realizing that rules are relative. They only need to make sense to each other. Accomplish that, and enjoy getting away with whatever the fuck you want.

Possession is so good at being a ghost story that it doesn’t even bother having a ghost in it. It’s presence by absence: there’s a field effect at play in every scene, invisible except for when it bursts into violent life through the vectors of Mark and Anna. The obvious word for this is subtext, but I don’t think that does the film justice. We’re not just seeing a lone idea (“Marriage, am I right?”) lying in wait, but a whole, concurrent second film (and maybe a third, a fourth) only visible through the weird ways in which it interacts with the first. The presence of another story is, well, a both a presence and another story. Subtext isn’t this fucking interesting.

This movie was directed by a panic attack, produced by an existential crisis, and written by a hallucination. The script was probably in Aramaic. And that fucking editing, man – cuts deliberately misplaced so they don’t line up with the expected beats of cinematic storytelling, moments ending slightly too early and at a slightly wonky pace, new scenes beginning without warning; we’re constantly deposited, disoriented, into the next moment, no time to gather ourselves or even really breathe. Imagine trying to take that phantom step on a staircase and eating shit, but in movie form, and for two fucking hours.

This movie is so fucking confident in its vision that it even knows how far it can take its gory-ass internal logic before the whole thing collapses into parody. Mark rocks in that fucking rocking chair like a Muppet on meth, but he’s so sickly and wild-eyed that you forget to laugh; the same effect occurs when he and the private investigator are talking in the latter’s office, both swiveling comically in their chairs in complete contrast to the seriousness of their conversation. Anna’s breakdowns always plummet towards parody only to swerve away at the last moment into something awful. They’re masterclasses in riding the limit without the effect being broken. This whole movie is a masterclass in riding the limit without the effect being broken.

The End

Lord, I love me a real movie. One complete unto itself and feeling no obligation to be complete unto anything else. Engrained so fully inside of its own logic that no amount of absurdity can possibly break the spell; subject to mechanics that – no matter how esoteric – always seem traceable back to the plane we live in, though never through any obvious method. Nothing is truly detached from reality if it’s continuing to create its own. Possession isn’t a flight from our plane – it’s an extension of it.

Something Sigmund Freud never said was, “The Irish are the one race for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever.”

Another thing he never said was, “That’s enough cocaine for me, thanks. I have work tomorrow.”

For brevity, we’re going to focus on the first one.

Red Dawn

Trying to see the world through the eyes of a corporation is like trying to mentally catalogue every single way in which it’s possible to die – extremely unhealthy, very little practical application, and only ever granting the illusion that you have any control over what’s going to happen next. You might as well aspire to perceive reality as an empty stomach does. It’s an empty stomach. It wants to eat stuff.

Which is why you should be suspicious of any studio film that claims to be about anything other than getting people to watch that studio film. Any philosophy more complex than I Have a Fever, and the Only Prescription Is More Money requires believing in something, or existing in any kind of sustained reality, which corporations do not do. It’s how they can claim to be genuinely concerned about the threats facing society (World War III – a bad thing!) while also giddily stoking the lucrative emotions that only exist because of those threats (World War III – the new Call of Duty DLC!).

I don’t even think that the weird bastards who run Business, Inc. are duplicitous – their towering indifference is more a requirement for and consequence of the fact that ascending to such an unfathomably high level of social influence requires being dumb enough to not only exist along a narrow greed-fear axis but also to forget, upon occupying one of those two possible conditions, that the other one still exists, has always existed, and that you were, in fact, occupying it not too long ago. Imagine waking up every day, fresh as a newborn baby, all of yesterday’s sins washed clean, ready to do the exact same dumb shit all over again. Lord, grant me the confidence of a moron.

Red Dawn is too dumb to get worked up about in any meaningful capacity. It manages to be bad in multiple directions simultaneously, which I guess is impressive in the same way that Evel Knievel jumping over things on motorcycles was kind of impressive, but the tonal incoherence hurts my brain. The Soviet invasion plot is literally, “fall from sky,” and the American response is so weirdly apathetic that the adults advise their children to flee the collapse of civilization with the same ambivalence as if they were reminding them to bring an extra pair of socks to a sleepover. Red Dawn can’t tell if it wants to be power-fantasy fun or stirring melodrama, so it settles on being boring instead.

The End

Red, white, and blue slop is still slop. Shit, I’d probably be more interested in Red Dawn if it was super jingoist-y – at least then there’d be something to push back against. And that’s the masterstroke of making Very Large Stuff to be consumed at a Very Large Scale – in spite of the superficial bigness of it all the secret sauce is deliberate emptiness, volume without sound. Nothing to get worked up against, just another thing to be consumed. Even patriotism can be rendered meaningless if you make it loud enough.

It’s almost noon and you haven’t shot anyone yet.

You want to make sure your Beretta still works.

You’re behind someone on an escalator and they’re just riding it instead of walking.

Your wife bought you thirty-two shotgun shells for Christmas and you’ll be good and goddamned if you’re not using each and every one of them. She even paid extra to have your initials engraved. You don’t deserve that woman.

It’s Monday, or possibly another day. You’re not really a calendar guy.

You completely lost track of who is a doctor and who is a mobster disguised as a doctor. Or, wait, wasn’t it the police officers who were disguised as doctors? Whatever, fuck it, blam blam blam blam blam.

Everybody sees that you’re holding a baby and they’re like, “Well, if he’s holding a baby I think we can safely assume he will not be participating in this shootout,” which, ahaha, do I have some shitty news for you, my guy.

They just came running out of a door, and you’ve already shot everybody else who has come running out of that door. You can’t just stop now.

They were wearing the same color shirt as the person you were trying to shoot. Or maybe they weren’t. It all happened pretty fast.

You’re swinging from a rope during your one-man raid at a mobster-controlled warehouse and you can’t really justify doing all of that without also firing a submachine gun.

By the time you remembered you’re a pacifist you had already shot everyone.

The End

“Put the babies in a safe place!” is a line in Hard Boiled. That doesn’t relate to the above bit, but if would be remiss if I didn’t write it down somewhere.

The indominable nature of the human spirit is matched in its sublimity only by when lots of things are on fire and everybody is running around panic-shitting themselves because they have no idea why so many things are on fire and they’re afraid that they might be on fire, too.

Gone in 60 Seconds (1974)

Smart people are a waste of time. Ohhh, look at the fancy boy, everyone: planning ahead, vaguely knowing what he’s doing, understanding that actions have consequences and that explosions are fundamentally dangerous and probably shouldn’t be the organizing principle of your day. Get bent, fancy boy!

Gone in 60 Seconds is a movie in the purest sense, because it’s literally just a guy pointing a camera at the thing that makes him happy, and that thing is vroom, vrooooooom. There is no consideration of audience or basic storytelling principles, because those things don’t go vroom, vrooooooom. If you’re not into cars, fires, motorcycles, explosions, abject confusion, cars, fires, and then explosions again, you’re in the wrong theatre, dude. This is a crazy person showing you his home-movie footage.

This film forgets to have a plot for long stretches – wait, let me try that again: this film doesn’t give a shit about having a plot for long stretches. The closing credits give the game away – it’s just footage of H.B. Halicki driving around really fucking fast with the name of the movie written on the side of his car. That’s all he wanted to do. The movie part was just to get suckers through the door. I wish I was smart enough to just fucking trick people into watching me do shit.

H.B. Halicki had a goddamn vision, and he wasn’t going to let common sense or basic survival instinct stop him from achieving it.

The End

A movie is two different things: a work of art and/or entertainment, and a look into the mind of its maker. Which one of those things interests you more depends mostly on whether or not that filmmaker was insane. The answer in this case is obvious: we have seen into H.B. Halicki’s mind, and it’s mostly just the sound of engines revving.

Idiots will literally kill themselves their own amusement, and God bless them for it. Anybody who would rather be on fire than be bored should have a hospital named after them. There should be a Nobel Prize for property damage.

Santa Converts To Judaism

Last Remaining Travel Agent Going To Get You To Acapulco If It Kills Him

Man Driving Car Knows He’s Not Supposed To Answer Texts, But That Phone Is Vibrating Like A Dog Shitting Razorblades

Cleveland Browns Contact Upcoming Opponent To Negotiate Terms of Surrender

Larry David Concedes Point

American Voters Prepare For Biennial Tradition Of Consciously Choosing To Make Their Lives Worse

Person Who Actually Has Asperger’s Wishes People Would Stop Claiming They Have Asperger’s; Would Also Like A Burger, Cooked In That Way – No, The Other Way. No, That’s Wrong, Too

If There’s An Easier Way To Masturbate Than Hanging Yourself From A Noose In Your Closet And Hoping That You Climax Before Accidentally Committing Suicide Then I’d Like To Hear It

Man Slowing Down As He Approaches Tunnel Just In Case It’s Only Painted On

Why Don’t More People Go Into The Attic. It’s Really Fun Up There.

— Monster Hiding In Attic

When Gene Rodenberry told the writers of the original Star Trek that the show couldn’t have any inter-character conflict, he inadvertently destined the Enterprise‘s maiden series to be a horror anthology. How else do you tell a story in which everyone is cool and gets along? If you’re going to remove “drama, as it is traditionally understood,” from your series, you kind of have to replace it with something.

But it turns out you can square that particular narrative circle with more than just salt vampires and albino murder-chimps – all you need are bops and vibes, baby.

K-On! The Movie

I have now watched two anime movies in my life, and both of them made me look forward to the Rapture slightly less. Yeah, yeah, selection bias and all that, but you need a generous menu from which to pull that biased selection in the first place, now don’t you?

No one is angry in this movie, and their decency infuriates me. It makes the guiding principles of my life – anger, caffeine – seem petty by comparison. All this time there were other, non-yelling ways to confront the vicissitudes of the day? I could have just learned to play a fucking trombone?

Yes, apparently – K-On! The Movie never deviates from its central thesis of “life is best experienced as an opportunity for wistful misadventures, rather than miserably accepted as the inevitable degradation of both body and mind, the culmination of which abandons you, screaming, in the midnight fire of an endless awful,” a concept they obviously never bothered to run by the Pope, because that’s the exact opposite of everything Catholicism has ever taught me.

I swear to God, this movie teases you with potential cruelties like the sauciest of vixens, only to slap away your rage-boner at the last second, just when you were about to give her an angry pearl necklace. When Sawako is talking about the girls playing a show for their class and she darkly remarks that, “I doubt they could handle the scolding we got – they’d be crushed,” I had to change my underwear. Pettiness? Spite? Sawako, the ostensible mentor of the group, showing her true colors by looking forward to the public humiliation of her young charges? Oh, movie, you dirty, dirty girl, you know just how daddy likes it, don’t you?

Except the next fucking thing Sawako says is “I have to protect them – I have to protect them!”

Jesus Christ, movie, we get it – you’re like if a rainbow boned a unicorn made entirely out of winning lottery tickets while Bob Ross painted the whole thing in a relaxing landscape. Quit hope-humping me, bro. I have vengeances to plan, and I can’t do that if I’m weeping over the infectious innocence of youth.

The End

Whatever, I give up. Maybe hope and vibes really are the answer to everything, and my attempts to spite-fuck all of reality are both childish and self-defeating. I’ll let love in, movie, I swear.

(But I’m never going to stop pounding caffeine. Even in heaven on Earth, daddy still needs his jiggle juice.)

Even a kitsch-drenched pill-popping ultra-parody of America’s pop-culture machine deserve a chance to tell his rhinestone-studded side of the story. That fucking hair, though.

EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert

Charisma and persona are two different things. The first one makes everyone like you; the second one stops you from going insane. The precise ratio you establish between the two determines whether or not you’ll be famous, and for how long. Occasionally a person comes along who is both attractive enough and dumb enough to justify turning the dial all the way to charisma. All of these people die weird.

There’s really no way to tell a story about Elvis that avoids the above statements, because he is their poster child. Cutting to footage of The King from 1955 or 1972 or 1966 is functionally the same thing as cutting to a film reel highlighting the state of the culture during those same years. Just like Warren Buffet can’t actually beat the market because Berkshire Hathaway is the market, Elvis can’t influence the culture because he is the culture.

If that sounds like a snake swallowing its own tail, it’s because it is – the saddest parts of this film are when Elvis tries to provide observations into the schism between the public image and the private self, and in attempting to provide evidence of the latter ends up reflexively clinging to the former. No one wants to see him – they want to see an escapist, idealized version of themselves, and he can’t help but provide it.

And while that snake never stops swallowing its own tail, it does manage to digest individual meals, so God help you if you’re dumb enough to get old. The zeitgeist wants someone limber enough to make for a responsive weathervane, and there’ll always be someone younger coming down the pipe, with fresher knees and thicker hair and a complete lack of any other relevant or defining characteristics – an empty vessel primed to have popular idealizations pour into.

Elvis seems like he might actually grasp this, stressing at one point in the film that he’s just out there for the love of music. But almost immediately after, he admits that he wouldn’t know what to do if he didn’t have fans, if he was no longer recognized in public. This existential crossroads would be a perfect time to have a sense of self to fall back on, but you’re only at that crossroads because you excised your sense of self a long time ago.

The End

This is not a story of moderation – if it was, we wouldn’t be talking about it – but a story of how far you’re willing to go to delay the inevitable. Fading into self-satire wasn’t unique to Elvis, nor is it the sole purvey of celebrities  – everybody starts to do an impression of themselves eventually, trying to recover something that defined them once, always vaguely aware that the performance part of this attempted recovery necessarily means it’s all bullshit. But what else are you going to do, die? 

We’re all doing impressions of ourselves, baby, and it’s a little less convincing every time. The only difference for celebrities is that the lights are brighter, so the makeup runs faster.

Jaylen Brown Wanders Beacon Street Looking For Next Person To Beef With

RFK Jr. Amazed That They Can Fit The Entire Internet Inside Of His Phone

Chuck Schumer Trapped Inside Of Room Because Someone Labelled The Door ‘Push’ When You Actually Need To Pull

Michael Bay Looks To Return To His Arthouse Roots, Begins Pre-Production On Transformers 9: Optimus Prime Says The N-Word In This One For Some Reason 

Woman Who Just Watched Her First Giallo Film No Longer Has High Opinion Of Italian Culture

Man Posts Jordan Peterson Video On Facebook, Waits Patiently For Feminism To Collapse

Horse At Petting Zoo Not Sure If He’s Supposed To Hold Off On Shitting Until The Kids Are Gone Or Just Let It Fly Or What

Man Wearing Imagine Dragons T-Shirt Somehow Has High Opinion Of Himself

State Trooper Can’t Believe You Have To Take All These Tests Just So They’ll Let You Shoot People

Frugal Pervert Waiting For Next Big Buttplug Sale

Man With World’s Largest SpongeBob-Themed Dildo Collection Fears There May Be No More Worlds Left To Conquer

Max Verstappen Overtakes Fellow Shopper With Bold Shopping Cart Maneuver

Shohei Ohtani Hits Towering Home Run With Pool Noodle

Dying Shitposter Wishes He Could Call Someone A Cuck Just One More Time

Police Perform Wellness Check On Home That Puts Christmas Decorations Up Before Thanksgiving

New York Jets Banking On An Air Bud: Golden Receiver Situation To Save Season

Disney Executives Give George Lucas’s List Of Ideas For Future Star Wars Movies To FBI

Middle-Aged Man Watching Porn Alone In Basement Apartment Pledges To Turn Life Around Just As Soon As These Freaks Are Done Going Ass-To-Mouth

Woman Absolutely Hasn’t Taken Too Much LSD, Has No Idea What That Floating Rhinoceros With Her Dad’s Face Is Talking About

Frustrated Kangaroo Wonders Why Her Pouch Is Always The Last Place She Checks For Her Keys

Here is how movies are made:

First, you take an idea that is genuinely interesting to you and that you are willing to go to great lengths to realize, then you secure the participation of others who share both your vision and your willingness to realize that vision, and finally you sprinkle in dumb shit to make the financiers, who are functionally useless squid-people, happy.

That’s pretty much it.

Let’s talk about the Cat People movies.

 

 

Cat People (1942) and Cat People (1982)

“What if werewolves, but cats, and also boning,” is an objectively stupid idea for a movie. Don’t take my word for it: the original film in this series was built out from its fucking title, because someone at RKO thought that Cat People sounded scary; costs were kept down by re-using sets from other movies. This is not what you do when you take your own concept seriously – it’s what you do when you’re trying to turn a quick buck on a schlocky B-movie concept. Cat People (1942) wasn’t even supposed to compete with the quality of the Universal monster movies, because RKO’s B-movie division felt they were no match artistically for Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.

But it fucking worked, because once rich people finished burping up their latest idiotic idea for easy money, smart people got involved and actually did something with it. The original Cat People is good! Layered atop its inspirational raison d’être of, “make me money – here is your sole resource with which to work, a large cat,” is an actual movie, one trading on genuinely creepy visuals and the theme of being enculturated into finding your own sexual urges monstrous.

And Paul Schrader’s 1982 remake continues in that fine artistic tradition of Fine, Whatever, I’ll Sculpt My Movie Out of Garbage if I Have To. I mean, this fucker hits the ground running – the audience is immediately thrown into a world of foreboding framing, the obvious withholding of vital information, oppressively unnatural color grading, and Malcolm McDowell doing that creepy thing he does where he just stands there and is Malcolm McDowell – everything you need to know that Something Is Wrong. If you were watching this movie in a theatre in 1982, you would be forgiven for thinking that the projectionist had accidentally laced up a movie with a better name than Cat People.

All of this is made possible by the fact that Paul Schrader is a smart man. He knows that he is being bankrolled by idiots, and that he must move among them, live among them, avoid their suspicion, if he is to continue making movies. It’s like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), if that movie somehow had an even more depressing ending.

Seriously, Cat People ’82 is like if someone recreated Michelangelo’s David entirely out of those gross Styrofoam clamshells that cheeseburgers used to come in. We have snap zooms on evil leopards, a somber reflection on the generational component of mental illness, Malcolm McDowell taking his impression of a hungry cat-person more seriously than the Allies took Operation Overlord, the psychological underpinnings of toxic relationships, so much gratuitous nudity that a woman who has just been mauled and forced to crawl down a flight of stairs takes a moment to pop her bra off because she knows what kind of movie she’s in, apocalyptic imagery that for some reason is also a music video, obvious giallo influences, and Ed Begley Jr. getting his arm ripped off. And it all fucking works, because Paul Schrader’s understanding of the Sliding Scale of Seriousness is goddamn masterful.

The End

Greatness can absolutely be born at the intersection of Earnestly Smart and What in the Actual Fuck. The suits will always exist, and will always be the ones signing the checks, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing – being forced to launder a real movie inside of a hulking corporate turd activates entirely different areas of the creative brain, leading to movies you might not otherwise have ever thought to make.

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but understanding how to work the system is invention’s cool older brother – not always around, sometimes misses Christmas because he’s out on a drunk, will probably eat it before the age of thirty because he fell asleep on train tracks, but always having a good time, and gave you a pocket knife and some fireworks for your ninth birthday. Maybe not world-class brothering, but at least he knows not to take any of this shit too seriously.

III

Penrose wasn’t stupid. Well, no. He was pretty stupid. But he did have a philosophy – one insightful enough that if it was the only thing you knew about him, you would be forgiven for thinking he was smart.

Here was Penrose’s philosophy:

“Have a Goal, Not a Plan.”

Pretty good, right? To the best of his knowledge, he hadn’t stolen it from anyone, and it had remained both true and useful for so long that it was one of the few things he bothered to remember, other ideas being allowed to just kind of flutter away right after being burped into existence – probably useless against the day, anyway, so why not just let them go a’floatin’ free?

Anyway, this philosophy – which will become more important later, so please remember it! – helped him bounce back from that night with Delphine. Waking up back on Puerto Rican soil, apparently without the use of a plane, next to an elderly piragüero currently serenading and/or accosting passersby with sweet arias about both the availability and unbeatable prices of pork and snow cones would be enough to throw anyone, but because The Philosophy urged him not to think too much about any one concern, Penrose stuck the landing better than most.

“That’s disgusting,” Penrose told the piragüero, while righting himself and dusting off his pants. “Who would want a pork-flavored snow cone?”

“No one. They’re two different things that you can buy.”

“Oh. That makes sense. But they’re in two different carts, right? So the flavors don’t mix?”

“Yes, the snow cones and the pork are in two different carts.”

“Well, that’s good.”

Penrose checked for his wallet, an empty stomach being one of the few bad things he was currently capable of making go away.

“Find the zero, Penrose.”

Penrose looked up.

“What?”

“I said, ‘What flavor of snow cone would you like?’”

They exchanged glances.

“I was… just going, actually.”

“Of course, señor! Where to, might I ask? Home?”

God, he hoped so.

–

The same wind that had been blowing in Le Lamentin was now blowing in Puerto Rico, and Penrose was starting to wonder if it had something to do with him. Sure, sure, vanity, God complex, whatever, whatever, but how else could you explain people turning and watching him as he passed, s-sometimes even nodding in silent approval of actions he had yet to perform?

He headed down to Paseo de la Princesa. Old San Juan was as good a place as any to be confused, and he needed an excuse to keep walking.

It was always a little bit weird, there.

All those tears in the sky over Princess Izzy’s walkway, background hiss to something that almost was – a hidden variable here, a miscalculation there, and suddenly there are abscesses on the body excreting poisons worse than chemical – time without reference finally confirmed but eternally out of reach, because there were just too many people with too much invested in that most precious of trade secrets never getting out, or at least never falling into the hands of those who might use it – God forbid – democratically…

“Hey-hey, Penrose!”

“Penrose, my man!”

“¡Es mi mejor amigo, Penrose!”

“We’re rooting for you, ‘rose!”

He was pretty sure he didn’t know any of those people.

He came to a stop across the way from Antigua Prisión La Princesa.

He stared at it for a while.

Like any prison, La Princesa was trying so hard to appear normal that it only came across as more grotesque. It’s the same feeling you get when talking to a sociopath – that something is off, that you’re in the presence of a person only here to seek out things it can control, it can kill…

… and soon every emotion revealed to be anger… smiles all the more hideous for having nothing behind them… the insistence that civilizing requires pain, constant pain, and that you should be thankful for it… the realization that these aren’t people at all..

… and all the while, pacing back and forth inside that cell, decades left on a sentence whose terms were never made clear, wet towels wrapped around the head, anything to combat the heat… being told this is what civilization looks like, feels like, requires… black tumors running up and down the legs, body rotting a little more with each step…

Penrose stood there for a while, feeling useless.

–

Well, there he was. Child-like antiquarian of all things stupid, caught in the throes of a wind he couldn’t begin to understand, somehow managing to be essential to all this while just fucking standing there.

Why was he just standing there?

Oh. He was looking at La Princesa.

Guess he’d never seen a prison before.

–

“I don’t understand why you have to do it,” his wife had said, after the teletypewriter whirred to life and punched out Penrose, followed by At the promenade. Go. Observe. Collect.

“Because it’s important.”

“It’s a message from a self-typing typewriter. Who are these people?”

He thought about it.

“I guess I never really thought about it.”

“Every bad person I ever worked for, I at least knew who they were. So I can draw lines when I need to.”

“If I draw a line, they’ll just draw a better one. Besides, I don’t think these people deal in lines.”

At least, not parallel ones.

“You told me when we got married that it was important we continue to maintain separate professional lives,” he reminded her.

“That was before your professional life made me start fearing for my biological one. And yours, too. This is a team effort, my love. We can’t move to Kütahya and become opium farmers if we’re both dead.”

“I know, I know.”

“Good that you know, better that you act. Why do you have to do it?”

Interesting question.

–

“Velocity – speed, and direction. We’ll get to probability in a moment. But first, the calculus. With the calculus, we can determine exactly how fast we were traveling at the moment of impact. This is essential. We will not always collide with enough force on the first attempt, so we must be able to determine how much harder we need to hit next time to make sure that the bonds are not just broken, not just unable to reform, but forget ever having been joined in the first place. You see…”

Believe it or not, this was an economics class. Well, kind of. It started off as an economics class – nighttime-held and invitation-only, deep in the fluorescent bowels of a building somewhere on campus, one not listed in any registry or drawn on any map, and with a name that was oddly difficult to remember, no matter how many times you heard it…

The first few lectures were actually kind of boring. Scarcity, supply and demand, monetary policy, elasticity… what was this, high-school?

It was near the end of the second week, after the students had started, possibly sub-consciously, to seat themselves in an inverted normal distribution, that he noticed something strange – a number of the students were laughing. Y-Yes, gleeful laughter, bordering on an animalistic chitter. Not at the lecture, mind you, but at… the other students. The guys sitting off to the side were oddly proud of themselves, laughing whenever they weren’t feverishly taking notes, sometimes even laughing while taking notes.

What about this class was worth laughing at? What about it was worth writing down?

People like this are only happy when they think they have some kind of an unfair advantage over everyone else, so the situation was clearly grim.

But he had an idea.

Next lecture, he showed up sporting horn-rimmed glasses and a crew cut.

”Well, men,” he said loudly, moseying over to the shady side of the lecture hall, “that Joseph McCarthy sure seems like a reliable fellow! Good, solid head on his shoulders, if you ask me! Bet he’ll whip that there Senate into fighting shape! Look out, reds, ol’ Joe has his sleeves rolled up, and isn’t taking ‘no’ for an answer!”

Cover secure, he slid in amongst the boys.

He tried to see what they saw.

My…

My God…!

There appeared to have been an entire second lecture going on the entire time, one only visible by shifting the apparent position of the first one. Those giddy bastards were hiding in plain sight, preserved in their stately remove by some sort of social parallax.

What were they discussing, in this land inured to both time and light…?

“The zero was discovered,” the new professor, who was also the old one, began, or, possibly, continued, “in India, by some dirt-monkey named Brahmagupta. Six-hundred Anno Domini. Now, there have been plenty of good, strong, white, virile, Christian mathematicians throughout history, many of them tough as Eisenhower and sturdy as a howitzer, so why did we need some mud-fucker from nowhere to hand us the keys to eternity?

“Śūnyatā, you idiots. That’s why. Think about it: we were unable to condense math into a straight line, or even orient it in a propitious direction, until it was first realized that lines and direction do not, strictly speaking, exist. Something from nothing, boys. Something from nothing.

“Natural numbers, integers, rationals, irrationals… we were turned away so many times, constrained by our Christian propriety, our inherent decency… numbers just keep going, no matter where you look. Nothing is supposed to just keep going. Not if we can’t. It’s not fair. Anything that tries to grow outside the light of our love is supposed to die, otherwise what’s the point of our love?”

A deep sigh, here. He wasn’t just being theatrical.

“It was all just too much to accept. Pythagoras himself took one look at the irrationals and fled back to the safety of geometry. Can you blame him?

“But Diophantus, Brahmagupta, al-Khwarizmi, al-jabr and al-muqabala… we needed those deformed minds to wander away from the light, wander to whatever dark place their sickness might take them, so that in seeing what purity wasn’t we could better clarify what it was. And it was, ever as always, direction unencumbered, inevitability confirmed. I guess the mud-donkeys were good for something after all, eh?”

And then – proof by contradiction, the law of the excluded middle, all those pillars of modernity were gradually relieved of their duties and replaced by softer things, things they had always been taught to mock, but that their professor now insisted had actually been stolen from them, and that they had to take back – the catuṣkoṭi, śūnyatā, something called topos theory, instructions to chant wu–wei, wu–wei as much as possible... a shapeless sea of equivalence and indeterminacy…

… and the professor fucking furious about having to teach any of it, that a class like this should even be necessary – the indignity of having to acknowledge debt, of having to ask villagers where the castle is because, uh, we seem to have forgotten the way – and, oh, uh, also, would you mind lowering the drawbridge, too, while you’re at it? We seemed to have forgotten how to do that as well, ha, ha…

(… b-but weren’t they supposed to be the ones who… yeah, yeah, of course…! so that meant… but… n-no… no… no… could it be…? were there worlds out there in which they hadn’t proven their own inevitability…? were others mocking them from the safety of yet another remove, some other remnant of home…? who was civilizing who, here…?)

“This week’s assignment: abstraction. I don’t care what you abstract, just make sure you abstract it. Be creative, and have fun with it. Remember: Viking slavers used to kidnap Irish girls and sell them in Mediterranean markets to capitalize on the higher demand. If Erik the Red can get in on the arbitrage game, you can, too.”

–

Squares inside of squares – that’s probability, baby. Each event creating its own little universe, inside of which there’s a chance another event will occur, creating its own universe inside of the first one, and so on (and so on, and so on, and so on.).

B-But the interesting part is that, from the perspective of the second event, the first event wasn’t probabilistic – it is the very foundation of reality. It had to happen, or else the second event couldn’t happen. The second event presupposes the first, just like any third event presupposes the second, and so on.

(And so on, and so on, and so on.)

His first instinct was to use weregild, that crowning achievement of human indifference, for the assignment, but someone told him that Teddy Meyers had beaten them all to it, presented weregild (the idea, not an actual amount) to the professor at the end of lecture, thereby already getting his A, and, presumably, a firm slap on the ass.

He was extremely jealous (when would society give him a firm slap on the ass?) but life is all about accepting challenges, and this was just another hurdle to clear.

He went back to drawing squares. Something about the process struck him as essential, not just to finding an historical example of abstraction, but in going a step further and actually isolating the very process by which abstraction occurs – the matrix wherein lies the rule for transforming any concern into the ghost-like projection of itself, captured and cast – dare we say demeaned and humiliated – onto a lower-dimensional space, with only its useful traits preserved.

How could that not get an A?

So there he was, locked in his damned room all weekend, tearing through maps, maps of all things, moving entirely on intuition, convinced there was something to be found in the picture of it all…

… the Babylonian Map of the World…

… eh…

… Kitāb nuzhat al-mushtāq fī ikhtirāq al-āfāq…

… no, no…

… Dr. Snow’s Cholera Map…

… hmm…

… wait…

… wait…

He was transfixed by that last one.

Yeah, that motherfucker, right that.

Something about it was beautiful. Mass death neatly charted, dispassionate black bars cascading out from a single point of infection. Snow himself had used this founding document of epidemiology to pre-empt future public health crises, which, fine, sure, whatever, but what Dr. Feelgood here didn’t see was the bigger picture: drinkable Death was taken out of a pump on Broad Street – its place of birth, if you will – and then walked around, New Street, Marshall, putting down roots in the community, stacking up more bars wherever it went… this must be how God saw death, right? Opaque killers moving, safari-like, amongst each other, piling up rival corpses, only appearing to Him as density clusters of larger or smaller concern?

D-Did he just…?

Y-Yes…!

The model was so perfectly abstracted that, just like how time and space switch places when you cross the event horizon of a black hole, the map and the thing it represented were also switching places – people were now perfectly transparent to him, nothing more than elaborate transistors, designed and kept in accordance to obvious synchronicities and oriented entirely around the fear of obsolescence… but even more fascinating was the fact that the map was now itself becoming a physical location – realer than the streets it represented, walkable, for the first time, in its true form…!

He couldn’t wait – the avenues were endless! – he had to go there now.

 

III-2

Joachim Penrose

in

“A Mine Can’t Exist Without Its Tío”

Everything gone beyond the zero continues on in other infinities – in dialogues of blue-black light, in shapeless derivatives of sound, in cities within cities within cities within cities within cities, of orichalcum, of cadmium, of adamant and uranium, of chromium, and zinc and tin and gold and cobalt, all of them still within their ores, all of them nearly human, all of them quivering with different kinds of life, all of them fearing only fire…

Whatever orientation serves your purpose best is possible in a land that is never allowed to stop moving – columns will rise on command, or instead be made to fall from the sky, down onto another world entirely, turned from exhaust to fog with only a change of t from positive to negative, coating roofs and filling streets in terrible and meaningless laughter, gorging factories with unexpected fuel, encouraging them to develop even worse kinds of fire…

It’s only a matter of desire to do this, only the giddy realization that your intention for the land has always been its single limiting reagent, the only thing preventing your property from becoming more of what your property needs to be… all it ever needed was you and your humble spark, to turn every abstraction into solid reality – geometries formed entirely at your discretion, physics waiting patiently for their instructions…

Regardless of how you got here, you’re here now, touched down in a dark and crystalline London –  it is this version of the City in which you must have business to attend. It must be, otherwise you wouldn’t be here.

Everything is made of heterogenite and magnetite – great buildings them, running green and silver and black towards what is now an equally solid sky. Veins of cassiterite line the street, and even smoke coming off the stacks is actually jagged, rising stone… down, then, you must’ve chosen down as the direction, because everything is rising the other way, crystalline and inert, somehow even darker than the night against which it pushes…

It’s too dark to see where you’re going. That’s what the négociants are for. They’ve set up shop everywhere, those clever rascals, anticipating every need, having invented many of those needs themselves – they’re always near a pit of some kind. It’s better not to ask.

A couple revs of the engine to let you know that he’s ready.

You climb aboard.

Sydenham isn’t very far from Soho, but you’re taking the scenic route. The négociant had already set off that way before you said anything, his only concern being a higher fare, but it’s what you would’ve asked for, anyway. You always survey the investment before making an offer.

Pedestrians of copper, nickel, lead – useful things, but runoff, mostly, and theirs to keep if they want. It’s the bifurcation that really strikes you, the replacement of light with its dark equivalent – not shadow, mind you – shadow just being the places light hasn’t touched, perfectly innocent – but anti–light, a phenomenon equal and opposite light in every way – removes information where light takes it, is neither wave-like nor particle-like instead of both, encases instead of casts out. The anti-light seems to coat the people even more than anything else, down here.

“These aren’t people, right? Just pygmies?” you ask the négociant.

He smiles.

“Fire without light is the perfect furnace,” he says over the sound of the engine.

You nod in agreement.

–

Smooth sailing. Imagine how untraversable this veldt would be without strong and proper lines. The darkness is bad enough, imagine if there was also no direction? Time left untrimmed is an unmanageable garden, as someone said, or will one day say.

There is no information desk at the Crystal Palace – people seem to be finding their way via extrasensory impulse. If you can’t sense destiny leading you to your necessary showroom then you shouldn’t be here, anyway.

And here’s the place for you.

An empty convention hall, seats descending towards the stage, on which there is a single showcase. You’re there without realizing you crossed the distance, staring down, now, at an old and fairly shitty compass.

Its needle wavers slightly, a thin steel erection, never quite satisfied, never quite still. It knows what you’ve come for.

“Can you imagine how embarrassing it was to realize where they had been hiding the coördinates?”

(…magnetic and geographic north split like a debutante’s legs…)

“It’s all about disruption, you see. Things hide inside of things, and nothing makes itself. You need activation energy. That’s where we come in.”

(…finding new land where land had already been accounted for…?)

“I mean, they’ve been mocking us all this time, with their dark and dusty coördinates. I might’ve done it to, had I thought of something that clever.

“But I don’t travel by the usual coördinates, do I? I don’t need to trace down x and y – I can smell where there’s more country.”

(…which has to be some kind of daddy issues, right? or, worse yet, mommy issues…)

The needle spun wildly, even more excited than it had been before.

… a shared language of that neither of them had even known they knew.