by Kane X. Faucher

"Ronald MacDonald Wants Arabia"
Illustration by Kane X. Faucher

Preface: The Ode to Nietzsche and Prologue to The Free Spirit

Twice! Three times! Another! Bloody fishwife doubloons of hate-war and their addled demographic of anal leakage and televisionary bric-a-brac! They are they, too many, screaming all sorts of obscene merchandising gestures and Hallmark gimcrack incentives into my ears while worshiping a clown god under a hamburger sky in a tempest of pop-up emails and grease! They say I am too hardened, negative, bitter...In sum: too full of life! Choking on life, and I am no essentialist! Every word of my wisdom was gained at the gunpoint of fate, in dramatic showdowns with constant failure--I have the wounds! "Collect your little words in a book," some unbearable sot said with Wagnerian opera creeping behind his walls like a threat. For sure and certain! Shall I make a show of my tragedies like so many jilted and bilked French writers? Should I put on my best Celine game face and fall all over myself in maddening apoplexy or fits of animal screaming? This is what the parlour of the Pleiades is looking for! Another literary waltz, another theoretical nibble, another asinine Punch and Judy extraordinaire to pad the Arts Section of the local mid-brow papers! Have I considered a movie of my life? Do I look like an alcoholic rocker with pretensions of singing the blues, only to die in a stinking crotchhole of a bathtub in Paris? I'd sport a big black swastika tattoo on my face well before then!

        And so I have decided to lay an egg rather than a legacy. Yes, I have mountains of notebooks that I carry with me everywhere, full of unapologetic vitriol and lament--but TRUE every word of them...So true that it is best kept in a dark cellar marked for arson. The best fate I can ask of my works and labours is that they do not make the stale upper-supper-crust circuit for navel-gazing poltroons who dab at life with a long stick behind an oak bookcase bubble...I would prefer that hooligans came across my works without knowing who I was, read them aloud in derision, fall into sick laughter, and finally set them ablaze or defile them with their soiled body cavities. That, my friends, is a more fitting and noble end to my work!

        I have been asked in premature fashion to prepare a collection of my musings. I say premature on the grounds that I am not done yet, and perhaps never will be. I say premature also for the reason that I will not be adequately received and understood until great and monumental changes take place in culture that may take centuries to unfold. The people are not only missing, as Deleuze said, but they are not yet here! They are not ready for me just as yet, and I am not about to make myself accessible for the slobbering rabble-ass shit-flingers in the circus of despair! Doors and bridges are accessible, and our age has no lack of accessible things. I am not about to reduce myself to the level of the people's convenience just on the account that they are lazy and want the "meaning" dished up to them in For Dummies handbooks and Coles Notes disaster point-form simplicity. I am as intolerable and unapologetic with the world as it is with me. I think that is only fair, all things concerned.

        I have since fallen from my grace and fame period--thank Valhalla and Fate! Thank Allah and the Cosmic Pig! I am no longer very popular anywhere I go. I have been all across so many lands, accruing enemies and credit card interest at a life-crippling rate, but through it all the question has remained: was it worth it? Ah, have I had done with VALUE by settling on the value of my traipsing through life and love? I still hold out for more noble values--

        Fame makes me too accessible, and I have already alluded to my feeling and value on that score. But let us talk about music and the tiresome thirty-year cycle, shall we? I feel somewhat passionate about music, to the point that I am unwilling to torture my ears with the bland soporific saccharin Mini-Pops Michael Bolton style money-grubbing pedigree of bad hair bands and gimmicky bullshit. Free jazz from the experimental late 60s Germany or avant-noise projects that are too slippery to be gentrified for me. Music is a very useful index of any age, as it is yet another media storehouse of how a culture views itself, the values it holds dear, and the problems it faces. The periods of true grit and cathartic aesthetic would be the 1930s, 60s, 90s, and the 2020s. I cannot fully explain without falling into assumption why these gripping and meaningful movements occur every thirty years...Perhaps it has something to do with the pendulum swing from one generation to the next, from left to right. It may also have something to do with economic prosperity or lack thereof. My highly appreciated decades have all succumbed to financial ruins. But it is in this time of strife that the greatest creativity surfaces. Take, for example, the idealism and the madly wild creative period of the 60s and you will begin to see my point. Psychedelia took center stage, laying to rest all that 1950s happy bourgeois bullshit of ducktail haircuts, cars with fins, Elvis, and the perfect WASP family. The 1950s were a large illusion, a stifling lie of order and prosperity, a triumph of deadly conservatism. Following the 60s came the disillusionment of the 1970s, a time of weary spectacles and parodic over-the-top acts signaling the decadent decline of the 60s ideals. Then came the 50s part two: the 1980s. Happy cocaine big business era of repression under the tyranny of king Reagan and Bush. Big hair bands approved by the parents' committees, and dreadfully boring (thank god for punk). And then the 90s came with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the recession, ushering in many angst-ridden lyricists of the grunge era. Add to that decade an apocalyptic feel (as erroneously Christian-based as that was, although still real insofar as so much cultural investment went into making it so) and you have the making of a Sophoclesian decade. I mean, who could deny the surprisingly potent and apt words of Mr. Kurt Cobain: "I miss the comfort in being sad"--What a startling critical shot against false 80s happiness and the rise of pharmaceuticals that have made it almost immoral to be happy ("no more excuses for unhappiness: regulate your emotions today with little pink pills!"). The early millennium decade, like the 70s, was a glut of spectacles: reality TV shows, Jerry Springer white trash KKK slugfests, pop star contests, behind-the-scenes exposes of "how we made this or that show or movie," S&M tongue-in-cheek documentaries so tiresome and weary as we talk sex to death in our attempt to repress it with our overexposure and body-hatred/fear. So there you have it...The Depression, the war in Viet Nam, and the apocalyptic feeling are all one and the same milieus of great creativity of which I was proud to be alive, well, and thinking. Conversely, the 1920s flapper-girl prosperity, the 1950s fat-belted suburb-building boom, and the go-go neon pink 1980s of big business are all examples of creative ebb. Of course there will always be exceptions. I pride myself in being a constant exception, if only because I am a resolute ironist.

        But we seemed to have drifted, haven't we? So you think me negatively, outright outrageous? Ho-ho, my little caged bird, just you wait until I set you free into the real living world of colour and flames! Living in the practical republic of that kingdom of ends where the "bottom line" prevails may seem real to you (as the indisputable proof of production-consumption issues from your spasming anus down to the bed of your lined cage!)...but--But! (always a but)...just shadows on the cave walls! Just because we can appeal to this shoddy and cadaverous, diluted and cancerous, aseptic and unilinear conception of the "real", it does not make it so, no, no, does not make it so. So...parade out all your petty vengeful logic that does nothing to persuade me. I have seen such colour, life, motion, chance, and laughter so that anything you could demonstrate to me from those ledgers of the practical real pale in comparison unless the purpose is to sadden me to your terminal condition. You can only offer me the grey walls of tepid and bland Reason as a poor defense, all of it that belies your allegiance to the businessman-gunman-axeman and other spectacle fiascos of your morbid era...the unending era! When the entire edifice of majoritarian values comes under its next crisis, and the degenerate slobs of the disaster are struck scared with the brimstone of Nature's revenge, take care not to count me among your ridiculously ordered ranks of the codiform failure.

        Yes, Nature's revenge, but not some backward Rousseau libertinage pining for the civilization of LITE beverages fed through the mesh of pathetic moral reason. The trees cannot gain the support of a reasonable overlapping consensus between their finger foliage and the many overprinted flags of the Sad Republic of False Tragedy! I had watched with joyous eyes as the fall of one building begets another, an inverse womb, the creation of pure vaginal space at the very base of Amerikacious penility. I sometimes play the tape backwards, observing how the standing tower produces the airplane from crumpled, fiery wreck into a pristine missile of vengeance, right back to that one moment just after the mediocrity of the passengers' flights was shaken by the destiny of the age. No more false apocalyptic feel, then, not like that scene in Deerhunter when the gunshot was always deferred in that Vietnamese betting circle roulette. Yes, those twinning towers, a becoming-cunt, unknowing of its fate. But panic makes the people buy, buy, buy, as if another set of pale overproduced linens will fill the growing chasm of the fearfully inevitable.   Perhaps this will be the day that we margin-aliens cast off our silly and ridiculous titles that lay claim to the margins inasmuch as a margin presupposes the viable existence and lordship of a mainstream creampuff center. Perhaps this will be the day when the justice of the great few will prevail over the sick power of the many. Perhaps my steps will be too measured, my words too loud, my actions too conspicuous in this era of fear, and I will be made the first enemy before the firing squad electric chair of American barbarity. People do not like their illusions shaken, and this is why we must dance lightly around patriots lest we succumb prematurely to their vile wrath...It would seem that the people fight more fervently to preserve a lie, perhaps realizing deep within themselves that their hold on the real has suddenly become very tenacious indeed. Deadly injection of the monolethal. The one-shot finish like so many cum blasts in the pornographic fabric of the culture's bloated desires. Problems have solutions, so say the demagogues who fan the fires of culture-hatred with asbestos-lined flags marked black and white. It makes me wonder if Hitler was such a bad guy after all compared to this. We have merely given our monsters cushy jobs and showered them with flowers, wreaths, and Roman laurels as they parade their war plans before us...they, the illusory conquerors who annex the lands but fall impotent to arrest the spirit. Their only power is in manufacturing caricature villains a world away (details? Complexity? We're too crude and stupid for subtlety and accuracy!). We'll need more than a grain of salt to take with these heaping doses of Hollywood-ready motifs so predictable and binary. But I am much too old to believe in monsters. I see bullies and victims across the globe, nothing more.

<<>>