Nervous Teeth Drink All The Poison
Short Fiction by
Marc Horne
Copyright © 2011, Marc Horne
Smashwords Edition
CONTENTS
8 OZON
THE UNIFIED THREE YEAR PRODUCT TRAJECTORY
THE LAST YEAR OF MOVIES
L.A. IN PIECES
LHC
IN THE SHAKESPEARE
SHIBAMATA, TOKYO
GEORGE LUCAS EPISODE ZERO SET DIARY
SHRÖDINGER’S INCEPTION
LE SANDWICH PARFAIT DE LENNY ET VANESSA (A LOVE STORY)
THERE IS A BETTER WORLD FEATURING TERENCE TRENT D’ARBY
MORRISSEY UNDER PRESSURE: A SCIENCE FICTION ADVENTURE
WHAT IS AUTASSASSINOPHILIA?
KEANU REAVES AND THE GHOST OF AKIRA, THE QUARTER BILLION DOLLAR BOY
DR WHO AND THE SEXY OF THE DALEKS
EL WU-TANG CLAN ENCUENTRA LA BRUJA DE BROOKLYN
MONKEY IS NOT ENOUGH
I REMEMBER YOU NASTY
THE NATURE OF THINGS
R.A.D.
a- The Magnificent Inheritance
b – The Geometry of the Bongo
c – Gardening as rot
d - What it means to be a doctor is to love
e– Under the telescope
NERVOUS TEETH DRINK ALL THE POISON
NOVELS BY MARC HORNE
(SEE HTTP://ZIZEKPRESS.COM FOR DETAILS)
Note:
A number of these stories appropriate fictional characters and celebrities to achieve their goals. Needless to say, these are fictionalized versions of the celebrities in question and are used as parody. No resemblance to any real person either intentional or otherwise is implied.
I made it all up.
8 Ozon
So, if I worked for Lawnmowers Monthly, I would not be going to Venice. But the little machine that I write about… she is called The Camera. And she is magical. So I am going to Venice.
Mireille is still asleep, down in the blue. Good. I don’t want to talk. What are you going to say? Some shit about socks, yeah?
I am flying on EasyJet from Charles de Gaulle. So that means you can’t even relax and enjoy your coffee. Because I am outside the little cattle pen where you rush for your seat. But then again all the seats are pretty shitty. There are likely to be no more than 5 attractive women on the flight, so unless you are one of the first ten guys on the plane, then so what. Ok, the cappuccino is good now. The Arab girl who made it for me is looking at me strangely, though.
“No, I’m not Tom Cruise,” I say to her and she laughs. I didn’t notice that she is young and cute before. Now I do. God, my ego is weak. She’s probably a hag with a face like a camel’s ass but I literally can’t see it because she laughed at my joke. I am hoping that the Film Festa will have some adventures so I can kid myself I am still young for another 3 or 4 months. Then I can start looking forward to Cannes.
I am hoisted practically into space. Above me is the unblinking blue eye of god. Below me the source of all meaning. Naturally, I sleep and when I wake I read about biscuits and how much they cost.
I split a speedboat taxi with a guy called René who takes photos for us quite often. He doesn’t care that we are in a place where people wear suits or harlequin costumes: he is going to dress like it is Indochina anyway. And he is going to sweat like it is Indochina. We come round into the Grand Canal and his sweat has me convinced that it is the Mekong Delta. He has so much metal hardware hanging from his khaki vest that part of me wants to push him in the water and have some fun. Ten years ago I would have done it. Now I wonder where all those urges are going. They don’t just fade away. I kind of feel them being put in a pocket in my soul. My soul has as many pockets as that fucking vest.
I turn on the fan in my hotel room. My habit since childhood. If there is a fan in a hotel, I turn it on. Then I watch it. But it is cold outside and huge black clouds are gathering over the Lido. I read an email from my boss. He really wants me to write something about the new François Ozon film, because it has Deneuve, Depardieu and Luchini in it. So make sure I see it, make sure I have a good chat with Ozon.
Ozon! Merde! Espèce de pédé.
I have nothing against gays… nothing. But this guy. I can never forget how carelessly he handled the breasts of Ludivine Sagnier in Swimming Pool. It was like watching a butcher throwing around livers. That’s how he sees them.
And of course, he pulls the old ambiguous ending. How much was fantasy, how much reality, oooooh? Look, when it is all filmed like that I hope it is neither fantasy, nor reality. I need some third thing. Banality.
And what was that one… 8 Femmes. Why 8? What the fuck is 8. And that whole film: like a fucking drag party at his house and he happened to have his iPhone camera running.
But hey. I work for a camera magazine. He has a camera. I’ll write about his fucking camera. The boss is obviously in love with him so whatever. He better be at a good party.
I get dressed sharp. I look good, like a wolf. Then I put on my hipster glasses. Well, they are not too hipster: a touch 50s Sartre. The wolf is in his cage. René is waiting for me in the lobby. He pretends it is chance but I know he has been waiting because he is so poised. “Oh, Stéphane!” he says, in the manner of Cary Grant.
We walk by beautiful canals. It’s raining. What else can I say? I need a cigarette, how about that. But this wind steals that joy from me. My tie flaps in René’s direction. He says “Are you going to go nuts tonight, my old friend?” I look back at him. “Unless tonight’s champagne is piss – literally yellow fizzy piss from a urethra – then I don’t understand your question.”
We get to a palace. I never knew that Elton John had built a palace in the Middle Ages in Venice. He is so versatile.
I start drinking with Romain Duris. He gets my fucking testosterone going, despite his lispy voice. He is mad for it. He is only making three films a year now, he says. The two crap ones and he is trying to make sure that he makes one good one. He will grow his hair to fit that one good one and the way it looks will be the way it looks in those other trashy films and they can suck it if he is in the navy with an Afro.
I lose ¼ of my mind and it is only 8pm. I sit down on a staircase made from swans and read a text message. “Got back from you know where. Making dinner. Call me tomorrow.”
A couple of years after we got married, when cocaine was suddenly in fashion, I rudely told Mireille that I never – ever – wanted to hear anything about gynecologists. So I get these messages now, all the time recently, with a big hole in the middle. Or she comes in the house and turns on the TV and I have to talk about work or something. If she has cancer, I’ll need to wait before it metastasizes before I hear about it.
I could talk to her now. But, I am old. Nearly old. I think it would be easier to build a time machine and go back to fix this.
I see Bernardo Bertolucci and I wonder if he will ever make a good film again. From the way he is walking, he’ll never make a film again. He looks like they cut something out of his pelvis, under the illusion that he could live without it.
So then I am face to face with Ozon. Of course, I am holding an almost empty champagne bottle.
“Monsieur O-Zen,” I say, “You are always so serene.”
He gives me the Buddha smile. I know I am not the drunkest man in the room, so why is he giving me shit. Wait, is he not drinking. I bet that it is it.
“So tell, me about Potiche please, maestro.”
“Well it’s the 70s. It’s about labels. About the way we present ourselves. About society and her tight constraints. A comedy. The bourgeois. Based on the play.”
And what happens next I am not sure. It’s like I am a Manchurian Candidate and he has said my key phrase. I think maybe there is a part of my brain that has heard these words so many times, it’s like dead grass. Thoughts walk across the grass, but it’s already flat, you know.”
Here are a few things that do stay in my memory from our conversation.
I tell him that yes, she is an old old woman and almost dead, but she is not dead yet and she is Catherine Deneuve so why would you dress her like that. She doesn’t look like a woman. She doesn’t look like a man, though. So neither of us are happy.
I say something about Depardieu. I ask why a young man like him would be content to let take that old dog for a walk around the park that he has pissed in so long that they are going to name it The Park of the Piss of Gerard Depardieu if He Was a Dog. When he dies.
He says something to me about how much he loves my camera magazine. I tell him that he should start filming in digital because his scripts smell like word processor.
And I remember him fondly taking me by the arm and leading me into the screening room.
I wake up in the front row with vomit down my shirt and credits going up. That I am not the only one… this comforts me a little. I clap of course.
Outside the rain is like the end of the world. Venice is in the sky. I find a mad gondolier and give him 120 Euros to take me home. The rain is coming down in fists. The canals have craters that we roll around. ‘Fantasy and reality are all presented on a single plane,’ as the maestro said.
The press kit is rolled up in my pocket. So I can write my review from that plus some trivialities that will sweat out of my memories in the morning. The canal is so close to eating us. If my wife dies before these fuckers… before me…
The Unified Three Year Product Trajectory
I don’t do what I do for the view. And at the end of the day not even for the cash, although I do have plans. I do what I do, because He was a simple carpenter, plying his trade for 15 years. Building things. That’s the secret message of the scripture, if you ask me.
But that is a nice view. No snow, except high on the mountains of course. Would be a nice day to take the bike out. But it’s an even nicer day to be here at Qteqk, building things.
--
I kind of ‘turn up’ at a meeting. That turns some heads. I fill up my water glass and say ‘Hi’ to everyone and find a window ledge to perch on. Meg will introduce me in a second. I take a quick sniff of the room. Some old dogs here, and some young scrubs who worked their way up from tech support. Meg lets them finish up their current spat: something minor about which protocol to support. It’s clear they have no framework to settle these debates. And that Meg knows that, but she is in too deep, too long in the manure.
She’s smart, though. Perhaps a little ruthless. Borderline deceptive if this goes on much longer with her not telling everyone the new sheriff is not only in town…he’s in the goshdarn room!
--
Meetings going okay. Lots of listening. Then letting them know I am listening. Eventually I get the question, the frustrated demand that I lay my cards on the table and say what I am going to do, what changes I am going to make.
“We are going to take the same brains we have now. We are going to take the same tech we have now. Here’s what we’ll do different. We’ll imagine there was no yesterday. We’ll imagine that all that matters is who wants to buy from us tomorrow. Because frankly, that is true. There is no yesterday. The people of yesterday are gone…I can’t sell to them.”
--
I bring in Yvonne Carpenter. Yvonne and I go back a ways. Back at IBM, we ran a pretty tight unit. She’s 20 years younger than me, but if I may say so, she had a good mentor!
I take her for a tour so she can shake hands with everyone.
“They’ve never had a Senior Project Clarification Officer here before, Yvonne. It’s shaking things up you just being here. But I got your back, you know that.”
Yvonne chats away for a little bit. I let her talk and run off her nerves. Once she gets past those nerves, she’ll be ready for the big time. That’s my goal for her: get her to a level of ‘cool’ where she doesn’t seem such a girl anymore. Ha… maybe she’ll stop wearing those crazy short skirts then!
--
I meet the German guy. He is possessed with –dare I say it – demonic energy. He got off the ‘plane an hour ago and I can practically see his trail of destruction as I head to our meeting. Cubicles with people typing way too hard. Corridor meetings with flickering suspicious glances all around. Gupta tearing up his MS Project that he keeps next to the picture of his lovely young wife.
Bernhard and I go at it, in a fashion. I explain that the tech group does good work, but that over here in head office we have been sending confusing and outdated market signals. That changes now.
He explains what ‘marketing’ is to me. I keep an even stare on his face. Red hair. Very primitive looking sometimes…on certain skull types. I used to surf. Sometime the swell rises to a point you can’t believe. You look down on this foaming screaming mess and you have to stay calm. You got up here, and you will surely go back down again. So yell away, Bernhard.
But then Meg comes in the room. From her perspective I am sitting placidly while the little German guy rips me a new one. She looks over at me with a hint of uncertainty. Then he looks at her like he would like to literally eat her. She shivers, I think.
--
New hire, not hired by me but reporting to me. A bit strange, but there you go. I take him out for lunch. With a beer, why not. Bending the rules a little bit, I suppose.
He agrees that the burgers are good here. Oh, come on! They are the best.
He won’t commit to an answer on that.
--
It’s a hard couple of weeks forging my product plan. The New guy, Keith, is an excellent Subject Matter Expert. I lock the three of us: Keith, Yvonne, and I in my office for three hard days. We have a vision.
I only have one doubt. Someone corners Keith and breaks him: asks him to define our goals. Maybe even in good faith: they just want him to inspire them. He couldn’t do it, could he?
They could get me through him. Not that it is about me. But by me I mean the Unified 3-year Product Trajectory.
--
“Got a book for you, Keith.”
He thanks me. Even calls me boss, which he didn’t have to do. I see that he is a bit wary when he reads the subtitle of the book.
“Don’t worry! It’s not a religious text! It’s a book I learned a lot from. Look at it this way. Even if you were an atheist – and I don’t know if you are. But as you know I am a lay minster in training. But I ‘get’ atheists, probably more than they do in some ways. But anyway even if you were an atheist…maybe MORESO if you were…you have to admit that one little Jewish guy in Galilee set up one hell of an organization.”
I walk him through part of the book that I want him to get. Not about Jesus. I don’t give a hoot about Keith’s faith (which he is really quiet about now, in my opinion.) It’s about Authority.
“Jesus had no power. I have no power. Sure I can – y’know FIRE you [ha!]. But how does that get you to work better, harder, follow the vision? That’s coercion, and it never gets more than the minimum grudging compliance. I don’t want compliance. I want enthusiasm – to be filled with the spirit.
“How do I get that? How do You get that from those around you whose souls we need in our camp? You do it by serving. That’s what the title is about. The greatest leader is the greatest servant.”
I slap him on his muscular back and I leave him to soak that up a little. Betsy is waiting on me at home. She hasn’t been getting much ‘love’ lately!
--
I bring something good up from the cellar. After dinner we walk and look at the mountains, holding hands. We talk a little bit about our ministry. Only three years to go!
She asks me if I will miss business. Flights to weird places. Putting out fires. Measurable success.
“Sure, I say. But to everything there is a season.”
--
Someone laughed at me during a meeting today
--
Someone closed their email real fast when I came in their cube. I just wanted to talk about the Chiefs game. He’s the Chiefs fan, not me. Frankly I couldn’t really give a hoot.
--
Meg flies out to Germany tomorrow. Really it should be me, but then again I am kind of buried. She trusts me to run the shop.
--
“Because you see the big picture. That’s important. You don’t just come in and start cleaning everybody’s shoes. The shoe-shine guy is not the CEO. You have to show your knowledge of the big picture and your absolute desire to serve. Only then do you become The Authority. It’s a double meaning see.
“You can trust me on this because I have been doing it for 20 years and as you can see it is working fine for me.
“I don’t do this for the view, but you can see right here that not a lot of people have a view like this.”
We watch a big front of snow coming in for a while.
Why is he so scared? I need to find the fear in him.
Yvonne come in the room. He lightens up a little. She’s more his age: that makes sense.
This is good. We have the core of a tight team here. I just need to get the other guys on board. I have fifteen direct reports now. And we are a long way from a first major victory. This is the dangerous time. A hungry time.
--
I have a nickname now. Not one I care for. “Chief Shoeshine Officer.” But at least I have a friend who forwarded that to me.
--
Meg is not supportive.
She is tired. I think she does prescription drugs. She is so thin and frail that she is hard to look at.
She tells me all about how powerful Bernhard is and how it is best to just follow along with him until we get that first big win under her belt.
I’m straight with her: we will never get that big win if we do things the Bernhard way.
She is okay if he drags us down. Then we strike while he is weak.
I don’t think she understands strength and weakness.
“I didn’t come here to fail, Meg. Not at this level. Bernhard will kill us if we follow your plan.”
She looks out the window. Windows are very dangerous things.
--
“Just a quick drink.”
Soon we are both drunk. Well, that’s what I think anyway! Seems that way. I crack a joke about how we almost went in that bar with the rainbow cowboy neon sign thing.
“So. How are we doing? What about this goddamn German, huh?”
I can’t get inside this guy’s head. He won’t say a single thing out of turn.
“Did you read the book?”
He did. He says he thinks it is pretty cool. He thinks it is very interesting,
“Eternal life is very interesting,” I let him know. “A flower in eternal life is greater than a galaxy here in dream life.”
--
I wake up and I remember saying that.
I can’t get out of bed that day.
Betsy makes the call.
--
Engineers are working on things I never heard of. Sales people got PowerPoints from heaven in their email.
This is a significant challenge to me. I call my capos in: Yvonne and Keith.
“Look,” I say. “Bernhard has blown it. The board want order. Not this chaos. You don’t tolerate Germans and all of their bullcrap to get chaos. You want order. That’s why you have a German. And do you know why you have your Americans?”
They are quiet.
But Yvonne knows. I give her a wink.
“DREAMS!”
--
I have started the process. A meeting will happen where Bernhard’s ideas will meet my ideas. Meg okayed it. Yvonne and Keith are putting together some magical stuff. Magical. I go in the team room with Y&K and I just kind of let it happen. I give them the freedom. The trust. They know I am going to be behind them 100%. They just have to dream it. Bernhard and his team of…Eurocrats… they are just puppets. Machines.
I bring the guys donuts and coffee. Yvonne is massaging Keith’s shoulders and his eyes are closed. They are both wearing similar shirts. Very silky, sort of clingy. Her eyes are not closed. She is looking down at him. Very attentive.
“Easy, guys!”
--
“You know what we should do. All of us. The whole team.”
I don’t really wait to let them guess. I am lousy at waiting.
“Whitewater rafting!”
They laugh but then I jump on the desk and I act it out: beating the waves down, shouting out orders to the left and the right.
We make it home. Beautiful hot red valley takes us home slow.
They dig it!
--
I visit Meg in hospital.
She asks me not to tell anyone.
“There’s nothing to tell, Meg. They all know you. The real you.”
She laughs a kind of dry laugh. Dry like fiberglass.
She says that Bernhard has worn her down.
I say that he is nothing. He’s old news. We have the plan and the team.
She says that he has broken her heart and burned up her body.
She says that.
She really says that.
But she promises that things will be okay. The board finally found a CEO. He is coming in a few weeks time. He is coming to judge the good ideas and the bad. She believes in my ideas.
--
I guess I fell asleep in that chair in the hospital. I wake up and they are sponging her down. I leave. It’s hard to tell what her body is made of anymore.
--
Betsy is not happy.
“She needed someone. What would the Lord have done?”
She tells me she doesn’t care about that. But she has a bad feeling. Like I should never have left IBM.
Frankly, I roar at her. She looks scared like she hasn’t for years: since I was a young dumb kid. Lord, what did she see in me then, practically godless: no more than an ape?
Thank you Lord.
--
I raid the cellar again and again. Soon I am calling it ZE BUNKER! I am doing Hitler salutes in the kitchen and shouting SIEG HEIL! SIEG HEIL!
I ‘make’ her drink. Although how do you make someone drink. I don’t pour it down her neck.
You can’t make anyone do anything.
Even Jesus can’t do that. That’s what this whole fucking 4000 year mess is all about.
Sorry.
--
All my troops are in the room.
Bernhard has done his preso. It was very backward looking, and I let him know it.
“Keith, our deck please.”
Keith has the flash drive. The PowerPoint opens.
In a few simple phrases we define the market, the channels and the only gap…a product we could easily make if we stopped doing Bernhard’s nonsense.
Bernhard says I am living in a dream. He starts throwing deep tech words around. He starts talking about how my product is made of unicorn tears.
I let him talk. But then I remember how he embarrassed me before. I have to shut him down.
“Bernhard. You had your chance. You took this company nowhere. Your role now is to execute. The vision is set here. We will give you everything you need to execute well. But please… for Lord’s sake… stop thinking.”
I have won.
Then he looks at Meg. It is like he has a remote control in his pants. Meg says…
You know I can’t remember what she says. I just remember how everyone looks at me as they leave the room and I stack papers. Papers so thin you can see through them.
Bernhard invites us all out for a drink.
It’s not even a mind-game. He only fights for the fight. No malice, no goal. He does not want power: it simply is him.
What to do?
Lord. What to do?
--
“Betsy, I have one advantage. Territory. When the new CEO arrives he is going to want to throw all of these ideas out the door anyway. All I need to do is show the CEO that I command Headquarters. Meg is a ghost. All I need to do is get the guys behind me. Just have a really tight team of my direct reports that can execute fast.”
I can’t wait until rafting season. I rent a lodge in the mountains. Time for the off-site.
Betsy comes in my room during the night. I ask her for a massage but she says her hands are hurting. So I try to massage her but she says she doesn’t want that. She just wants to hug.
The hug is sucking energy from me. I break away.
Betsy understands. But does she?
She is not invited to the offsite.
--
I plant hints all week for my big team.
It is going to be awesome.
This is where the new Qteqk is born.
And fun! I have so much meat to take up. My brother in law is a butcher.
--
I pick up Yvonne. She squeezes in next to Keith.
“I have driven through worse than this!” I say.
But that is an absolute lie. It is so white and so silent on those mountain roads that I have absolutely no idea how I could tell if we died.
--
No-one else makes it.
Keith hopes no one had an accident.
“Oh really?” I say, sarcastically. Yvonne looks p.o.-ed.
--
The lodge is frozen up. We grab blankets and sleeping bags and head back to the meeting room, where there is heat. We put down sleeping bags and play movies through the overhead projector.
I have enough meat for an army. We get a little fire going and cook it. Slowly. We are all sweating. Yvonne keeps bringing us drinks.
“We can do this,” I say.
I never figured out Yvonne’s ethnicity. So I ask her.
She says she is white but funny looking.
“Keith can we do this?” I ask.
Keith is sprawled on the floor. He says that in all honesty he thinks we are screwed. And that he has burned a lot of bridges.
“So you think I am on my way out?”
Keith says that he does. But I sense sadness in him.
“Keith and Yvonne, you both make 120 thousand dollars. I can make that 150 with my little BlackBerry right here. No need for approvals. Can’t be reversed.”
I have their attention.
“And I will do that for you. If you prove…that I had your loyalty and I have your loyalty now. You have to show me that I have your loyalty.”
They look at each other.
“Show me something.”
--
And now I am watching them.
They are going so slow.
He’s just crushing her into nothing. And she is looking at the fire.
And she clenches her mouth and I look down and... well of course she is clenching her mouth.
Of course she is.
But she should look at that.
If that is going to happen, she should look at it.
--
I have my hand coiled in a rope of sausages.
--
The door opens suddenly.
A man walks in. Olive skinned. Long haired. Bearded. Untouched by the snow. Glowing. Gleaming. He sees us. He sees what we are doing. I see the wounds in his hands.
With the sausages’ wet meat I shield myself and I kneel before him and I say “Let me serve you, master let me serve you.”
--
Before coming to Qteqk, he ran a spaghetti company.
On the way to the mountains, he blew out a tire and had to change it in a blizzard.
--
There will be no ministry.
Betsy does not come back to our home.
At the end of the day it was just work stress, alcohol abuse and a little kinky trip. Not worth killing yourself for.
I sell half of our past. It gets me a small amount of future.
At no point can I see a decision that I made that was all about me.
So I don’t think about forgiveness.
The Last Year of Movies
America. At one time, great films accidentally leaked from the great machine. Until the leak was noted, contained, industrialized. And then one day they found Quentin Tarantino fucking some little tube round the back of the machine that was still moist. And then they sealed that up too.
So, I don't think I am going to be able to pull some miracle off for my new assignment. No second Cahier du Cinéma.
The great editor called me in his office. He got straight to the point. His first point, that I was a destructive shit who was unaware that the developed world was almost out of money and that vomiting champagne on models’ toes was no longer titillating decadence: it was tantamount to lying on our backs with our arms splayed wide and waiting for the Chinese to bayonet us from groin to gullet.
Then we started drinking.
I was looking at the paintings on his walls. They did not resemble him, or oppose him or intersect with him in anyway. Smudgy things at right angles to him. Then I remembered he was screwing his office assistant for a long time. She was in her forties but a hell of a machine. Now she was smeared all over the walls. She moved to the countryside a couple of years ago, suddenly passionate for cows.
"Chef, why no photographs or film posters in here?"
"They do not pay me to look at walls, Stéphane. Nor I you. I pay you to drink with me, fuck around with cameras and gently cover movies.
"And so I am sending you to America."
And suddenly he is sweating. Because he is not an emotional man. And whatever lies he is going to use now are lies around an emotional topic.
And then I remember Mireille playing piano in our apartment. Never delicate, each note as big as the apartment. Our old apartment. Our apartment is parted. Part is an empty box, part is a big pile of crap that her parents have taken. Part is my books, my cameras that René insisted on looking after for me. The final part is my suitcase. As for the people, they no longer remain.
"America."
"Yes. I can't trust you around sensitive French artists. You have become too... I don't know. Too rock and roll. So I need you in America, to expose the heart of American filmmaking."
The drinking has brought the night too early and too close. The buildings burn bronze below.
“I should visit a spreadsheet if you want me to go to the heart of American moviemaking.”
-
So...LA.
I do t have too much to add to the corpus of opinion on the subject, except to add that the only type of person who could ever live here is the kind of person who genuinely believes he is never going to die.
I have meetings.
-
“Yes, I am a little offended.”
I walk around his office looking for signs of eccentricity. A small fully functional sex-doll made of toilet roll cores or something in that genre.
Instead, I find an office so simple, plain and tasteless that it is a pose or not his real office. Perhaps in a Gondrian conceit it’s all made of papier maché or can be cleverly reassembled into a messy, artistic mechanism.
He puckers his bulldog-like face a little. I can imagine him having a tolerance to alcohol of a very low level, like a Japanese. And so I might be swirling molecules all around his room that taunt him. Or maybe he’s just irritated, but I don’t think so. The twitch is too weak to fight me and too queer to melt my heart.
“What… because I ‘Frenched’ my way past your P.A. even though you said no? C’mon, M. Gondry! Camera Magazine is the perfect magazine for your work. It’s all about light going in boxes then out. That’s Gondrian, I say. No?”
He sits down and starts tapping a little pen. Some anonymous Bic…not a cheap but immaculately crafted thing from Shibuya.
I look at him hard…suspecting an imposter, a mask. His face is rubbery, that’s true. But that tells me nothing. Gondry is a rubbery little guy. So I’ll just write up my suspicions, set the scene and let my readers decide which way they want it to be.
“So…The Green Hornet…”
“Yes, I was fascinated by this project. On one hand he is a figure that has been existing in the U.S. for…oh…many years. Since before we were born.
“But on the other, he has made little trace. And I think it is his name, y’know. It is slightly wrong, slightly miscalculated. It has no alchemy. It is like a cracked vase that can hold no meaning.”
I nod. He’s right. But still making his pitch? You made the movie already man! Let’s talk movies!
“Ok, mec, I like it. So then you made the movie. Is it ‘awesome?’ Will it ‘kick ass?’”
Gondry wriggles in his chair. I make a mental note to say “ass” a few times more this afternoon and if he wriggles consistently this will be a major theme of my article.
“The script was constructed to…have those effects, yes. I kept the humor and the action. And I have added mainly a system where there is a new kind of fighting. They don’t fight to kill –not in the traditional way – they fight to steal each other’s time.
“And since time in the world of the Green Hornet…the world this guy is going into…time expresses itself as action and jumping and moving so when one guy beats another guy’s…face in, there is not blood but instead there is a time fluid that passes between them. One speeds up, the other slows down.”
“So…no one dies.”
“It’s impossible to tell. Time stops. Possibly this is true in our real life.”
“So you have…this is…time stops…”
“Exponentially decreases. So actually never stops.”
“But even if it was agony Mr. Gondry? Even if it was agony it would just become infinite while everyone was contenting themselves that you were at rest while they drank and didn’t even keep their neckties fastened?
“I removed agony to maintain comedy. I put shame in instead.”
I pause.
“And you don’t drink?” I ask.
He shakes his head.
“Only a little with my mother sometimes.”
-
The Green Hornet (dir. Michel Gondry)
A playful caper that sadly will not explode the Superhero-movie boom. Gondry delivers his most sublimated work to date, and reveals that perhaps it is best that he has moved on to his Hollywood period. Watchable.
-
John Cusack is surprisingly old. He dips crackers in his soup in the big deli in Santa Monica. He does it like a homeless man would do it…with a lust for life that fades every time one breaks and then rekindles because there is something inside this person which indefatigably prevents them from becoming a corpse.
I join him at the table and he doesn’t read. Doesn’t try and charm me. His typographic eyebrows look on me and his metallic eyeballs flick up and down from his shitty-looking soup to my face.
“So. Le Camera de Magazine! Slummin’ it at the coal face. Come to write about our decadent old biz, eh?”
I smile weakly.
“I liked High Fidelity, I think,”
The weak smile. This is a new thing I am trying over here. It drives these fuckers crazy, like when you sleep in a hotel room with a slightly broken fridge and it almost wakes you up all night long.
“So…you are an accomplished film-maker in your own right: was it your conception that your cop be ‘grizzled’?”
“The Goddamn French, man! OK, order yourself a coffee to bitch about and then we’ll talk about hookers, serial killers and the like. Yeah and the hookers too, that was me."
I get the impression he is happy to talk like this. He wants me to drag him in the mud, content that this will only appear off in France somewhere. Like a celebrity doing a commercial for tiger balls in china.
"So do you consider this film...Important in some way?"
He pauses and looks over his shoulder. The wood panels of our booth hide most of what we are doing, but I am guessing there is a certain skill - a certain way you can tilt your head so you can spy on your neighbors.
"What...like...to the world?"
A lot of emphasis on the last world. He's going on the offensive against me now.
"In any way. Important to your career. Important to Hollywood. Important to the New Zealand competition winner guy who is directing it. Important to hookers. I am leaving this completely open to you."
He pauses - ice cold. Then the OMG half laugh. Then the conspiratorial lean in. It’s surreal talking to these Hollywood actors. The French guys... you can tell when they are acting, because outside of the movie there are basically only two ways that French actors address the press and so you say - ok this is the press voice. OK, then also they have their drunken lecherous personas which click in eventually but by that point I am drunk too, so it is academic.
But the Americans. Is this the Gross Pointe Blank character with me now? Or is this the real Cusack. I don't know. It’s unprofessional. It is too intimate.
"You haven't even seen this film but you think you can come over here, reeking of Cointreau and tell me how I should be living my life or something? I mean couldn't you be giving Daniel Auteuil the third degree now. That fucking gay farce thing that I came THIS close to having to do the remake of."
I suggest we go and get a drink. He suggests a dive bar full of Mexicans. He thinks it is a challenge to me to get real. He is showing his authenticity. But to be truly authentic we would be having this discussion in front of English speakers who give a shit about the Cusack oeuvre.
-
"…but it’s his own fucking daughter man. So he changes his detachment. It's like.... It’s like a metaphor for Guantanamo bay. He's all by the book, despite the sheer depravity of what he is facing. But then it touches him. And he is reduced to savagery...savagery with a badge."
I face the depravity of this awful Dos Equis Mexican beer. Two guys in heavy plaid shirts are talking about some woman and their tongues are like eels. One guy is talking about what he did and the other is laughing and laughing. They both look like they have erections.
"Okay you talked me into it. You had to make this movie. And in the process, we have a new drinking game. You name a movie and I have to say why it is like 9-11. Ghostbusters is like 9-11 because by locking up the ghosts - which are Palestinians - we unleash massive destruction on NYC. "
He's looking at his watch. Who has a watch these days? Fucking Cusack.
"Hey," I ask, "what happens in Ghostbusters 2?"
The bigger Mexican guy punches the smaller one in the throat.
-
The Factory (Dir. Some guy from New Zealand FACT CHECK REQD.)
A grizzled cop tracks down a serial killer, who eventually targets the cop’s own family. Cusack summons emotion from unimaginable places to act in this film which supplied employment to many hard-working Americans.
-
I drive back from Santa Monica to Downtown where my hotel foolishly exists. The weather has collapsed. It is grey metal now, and looks horribly, horribly more real. Like a smooth IMAX dome onto which paradise had been projected. In HD.
And so it turns out that all it took was clouds to move us from heaven to the world left behind by God. God’s coke can. God’s cigarette end. Concrete like Chernobyl. Palm trees like you see at a newsworthy volcano. After a week of this, the rich would be gone. The left-behind hungry machinists and fumigators would drink from their pools, find sexual uses for their sculpture LIVE AS THEY BELIEVE THE RICH MUST LIVE including driving off a Malibu cliff alongside their battered wife, full of any drink with foil on the bottle, masturbating themselves with a vibrating blackberry.
How's my driving? You are trundling forward admirably.
What was I doing? Also trundling forward admirably. My grief, my grief that was so physical that my skin and hair were peeling off, proved to me definitively that I was a primate, an animal, and that my thoughts were just the sweat of the brain doing its real work: finding bananas, trapping ants for protein and entertainment, clinging to another ape long after the mating ended just because the extent of my senses had gone too far and I was capable of understanding what the night meant.
Bad weather, this. And how dangerous the good weather was.
-
“happythankyoumoreplease”
I am going to actually see this movie. A leggy young woman with American hair – pre-George-Bush, endless possibility hair - walks very fast down this red-carpet-red red-carpeted corridor. She hugs her clipboard with all the joy that fills her just by being ‘in’ Hollywood.
"Well - well you know - it was a big hit at Sundance 2010 and all we did...all that the director wanted to do, was just tighten up some of the conflicts and punch up some of the characters and maybe make a movie that would play a little stronger outside New York."
I catch up with her at the screening room, a beige transition. I’m breathless, speechless, worthless. The screening room looks like a pit to me. I haven't seen a movie since my wife died. But it is just a movie I am going to watch with this long blonde girl who would be delighted by me, the French guy at the top of the hill, not yet rolling down it. Haunted but still able to move around and be sardonic with her similar friends. So similar, that I could screw around on this girl and have total plausible deniability. ‘Look, we had a few beers, I was like why are we going to this strange apartment but whatever and then I apparently fucked Trudi but, you know, it was your decision to go to he same stylist as her.
So then we sit down and she checks something off on her clipboard and makes a little gesture and the lights dim. Her fingers are long and they love these gestures
The film happens. New Yorkers fall in and out of love and wonder why and, like, where are they going and, like, is it already too late for them even though they are young and gifted? Was it too late for the, the moment they were born?
It ends and I feel like I had a script read into my brain. But he did achieve a few good images and maybe he managed to be closer to Woody Allen than to Friends so I look over at the longing eyes of the blonde and I give her a tired thumbs up that would set them roaring back at the café and which gives her the first hint of an orgasm.
I ask her if she is seeing anybody.
I want to ask her a drink and I know she w ill say yes and I don't want to get her into trouble so that is why I am asking if she is seeing anybody.
She says no and I don't even try and figure out what kind of no it is. So, out for the drink: I talk about everything in my life which is not about my dead wife and the moments we shared together. There is much to talk about, it turns out. Too, too much.
I am not sure what time people go to fuck in this town. I ask a guy in the men’s room and he looks at me in horror. I have just spawned an anecdote, and perhaps even permanently added to the reputation of the French people.
So I decide midnight, and at that time seduce her and we go home and I enjoy her youth and the physical and mental flexibility that comes with it.
"So what is the difference between French cinema and American cinema, then?"
"Well there are some similarities. In both countries, too many movies are made. In our defense, most of our unnecessary movies have at least the merit of being about humans talking to each other and not about robots destroying each other. But I think the biggest difference is this: French directors can make a good movie accidentally almost. They get their money from Canal Plus and they go away and find a guy with a typewriter who has been sitting and watching the Seine everyday to put some words down. And then they shoot, and the actors are truly top class, even the good looking ones. I think there is a government limit on how many actors there can be, to make sure they each get to make their five movies a year so the talent is really deep. Et voila!
"You know how it is here.? A guy like Aronofsky, a real talent. He has to fight and fight and fight to keep making good movies! Like they think they can trap him and tame him and get him to make some perfectly Great shit movie for them. He sweats years away fighting off bad movies coming from a focus group of retarded incestuous chimps. Then one day he slips up. They tease him with an Oscar nomination, he strikes back with a Natalie Portman lesbian scene. He has played right into their hands. Next thing you know he is bringing his own unique vision of THE WOLVERINE!"
She looks over at me. Her apartment is perfectly lit to make her radiant in bed. Perhaps intentionally so. She knows light guys, after all.
"But what about like...editing styles and mise en scène?"
Her longing...for something better, in me - and in the world - reminds me too much of Mireille and I am planning how to get out of here now. Cheating on her in death is harder than it was in life.
“Americans can't do endings,” I offer her.
-
happythankyoumoreplease (dir. Josh Radnor)
First-time director and writer uses the millions of dollars he raised to chat to the world for a couple of hours about his life in NYC. We all need, from time to time, to top up our mental model of NYC and this film will serve that purpose well. Attractive female leads.
-
That looks normal. That looks like someone you don’t have to worry about, or immediately search for.
Send.
I’m done with L.A. I decide to head to Mexico. To the borderland. Call it a vacation, shall we, so that I can do it.
Mexico.
I refuse to accept that bodies hanging from freeway bridges mean that I shouldn’t go there. Although…these are decapitated bodies. Logically, therefore, they are hung by the ankles. So, when I get to San Diego I shall simply cancel my reservation for a convertible.
First, get out of here. I decide to walk to the train station. It’s only a couple of miles. But a lot of it, I’m walking high in the air over frozen red freeways. Too high, and time is too slow. Looks like a God-mode, like a Gondry gimmick. Like L.A. stops trying when she sees you are leaving. Freezes a megaton-of-gasoline river and waits for the young, rosy-cheeked, unstoppable German backpackers to come.
Well let them come and then turn the clockworks back on. And let the algorithms and the banks and the channels and the templates and the reflexes that twitch…that hold on…that remember…that were once human…that still think they are human… let them make movies.
And let the movies make lights.
And let two people – whose touching hands are enough – watch the lights and laugh. And later one will sneer. He’ll sneer more and more as the years pass and for no deep reason. Just the sneer of the man who didn’t win the lottery but he HAD A TICKET! LISTEN EVERYONE, HE HAD A TICKET!
Then perhaps the same movie, perhaps the same hands but one stiff with bones now. Giving more love than…than…anything that ever came from the sky.
The hospital.
And then after, the home.
The lights. Because the words had failed before, would fail again and anyway, they hurt.
So new year bring your movies.
Fill the boxes.
L.A. in pieces
Downtown Los Angeles
An Ethiopian girl at the bar with a black tear tattooed beneath her eye.
A Japanese business man outside in squid ink blue, upright like anger.
A Mexican VHS shop, plastic wrap glossy with Jesus of Nazareth as number one box office draw.
A plastic bag on its back, different only from a dead cockroach by its vast size.
And all the homeless have wheels.
Nightwalk DTLA
UNION STATION
An indoor umbrella goes up and down to catch the memories of leaks.
A blind woman scowls on behalf of her cane, skittering on Italian marble.
Bulletproof men film a chubby white dork pretending to be a terrorist.
The thing the cockroach gave up on two days ago.
One minute in Union Station, Los Angeles
The Forbidden Dance
They are pushing and shaking the old caddy, made of angles ‘cause it’s from the old days.
They are Arabs or Mexicans. I am not a racist. It’s dark and there is loud music coming from that hotel that men live in.
They are shaking the car and I see a man inside, who is not moving.
The mix of anger and joy in the three more-Mexican guys and one more-Arab woman’s face is found mainly in riots. The stillness of the man in the car is that of the policeman who took the wrong turn on the night of the uprising.
He’s actually a head.
Because it is very loud, and I am in a light-based reality, he is just a head.
It’s the head of Harry Dean Stanton. Pickled. Then mummified. Then put in the trash because that didn’t work. But then they found they had no other heads. “What? Do you idiots even know how hard it was to get the head of Harry Stanton?” So then they go and find it and frankly it hasn’t got better. They bring it back. It ends up in this car.
If all this talk of Harry Dean Stanton has thrown you – perhaps you don’t know the actor in question – just imagine instead a regular man who for his whole life was told that smoking cigarettes was food and who found out the truth about an hour ago.
But he is just a head now. And around his brow, and looped at the base of his neck, are LED Christmas lights of many colors. In fact not Christmas: Fiesta. If I had to guess, and I think I do, I would say he festooned them himself. They do not generate the intense white light that holds his face. I can’t locate the source of that miracle.
I get closer and a new sound comes to the front. I think it is coming from the car, like a novelty horn. It is a digital arrangement. But it is still the lambada. The forbidden dance.
I almost knock over their child, who is 2 feet tall and with a towel tied around her head and who suddenly jumped out. I don’t touch her. I touch no one. The whole little puzzle goes behind my head, where it belongs.
Wet Look
In your wet look leggings
You don’t look wet
But you remind me of
The housing project
By the tracks
Where steel crucifixes stand
Out back
Free of laundry,
Graffiti,
People,
And everything
But geometry
Girls and Dogs
While the Mexican girls walk the dogs
The old folks get a break from happiness
The Cherry Picker
On your blue cherry picker
if you blow up building 7
you'll knock down many palm trees
and your silver helmet will spin like a coin
Ballad of an L.A. Mensroom
The shakeoff
at the next urinal
has a rubbery squeak
WHAT IS HAPPENING?
Police tape
on the sink
LHC
He first became concerned while watching the TV news late one night and hearing about baby black holes. Just hearing that expression on TV was a problem for him. He couldn’t figure it out exactly at first: holes with babies in? Babies with holes in them. Oh, baby versions of those black hole things in space.
Well maybe that was cute. Like those Sea Monkeys he got when he was a young boy. Except they weren't cute, were they? They were smelly little stains that he was never sure were either dead or alive.
And now he was learning more and more about these babies. He had to get to bed soon, because tomorrow was work and work meant that he had to be alive and talkative for the first few minutes before he went and looked at barometers for the rest of the day. He had tried to do away with those first few minutes but he found that what happened then was that people would suddenly pop into your cube and they would see what you were doing and look at your doodles and say, “You are very artistic.” So instead you had to spend a few minutes laughing and chatting and looking at the ladies.
But, that said, this was interesting news. They had built a steel donut bigger than Paris that slopped between two countries. AND THIS WAS THE FIRST HE HAD HEARD OF IT. And when they fired enough energy into it to light up [big place] for [significant amounts of time] there was a chance that these various sloppy, tripe-like theories about the universe might be proved and then we would know what everything was made of. POTENTIAL DOWNSIDE: Baby black holes spawned in Switzerland, end of world.
God. Did that make him feel more or less like going to bed? Unclear.
Next day, after waking on the couch which was just embarrassing – his own couch! – he surfed the ‘net. No, first he did his 100 sit-ups that he had done everyday since he was on the school cross-country team. Then he looked down at his skinny, steel-hard body. Then the 'net.
It just got worse, you know. There were these things called strangelets. There was a chance that a single strangelet could turn the whole world into a big glowing ball of strangelets. It wasn’t stated explicitly, but he assumed that would mean everyone was dead (because glowing.)
He went to work and counted the things that he could see that could kill him and stopped when it got past 1000. But he was still not happy about the Large Hadron Collider. If he died from that taxi mounting the curb… well, he was ready for that. He had spent years thinking about that. About the things they would say about him at work: both the nice, sweet things of the first week or so and then the cruel things that would grow to dominate.
And so, he was ready. That death was the one he was expecting. And the fact that he would live on in the coffee room, in the filing system he had innovated, in some of his witty jokes about anti-cyclones: this sustained him.
Global annihilation was ruining his afterglow afterlife.
He sat down and wrote a letter to the director at CERN. Since they were Swiss, he wrote it in his finest hand and mailed it.
He received a form letter reply two weeks later. What were those two weeks like? They were like a punch in the balls from a toddler. Fucking awful but you weren’t supposed to make a big deal out of it.
Opening up a big bag of Monster Munch and a can of cider he read the letter. After a minute or two he took a deep breath and looked dizzy. He put the letter down.
It had all started so well. Detailed descriptions of urban myths vs. hard Swiss safety precautions. The exciting joy of knowledge. Then the cruel crack in the face of the cuckoo clock. “I can assure you that I and my team have taken every precaution to assure the smooth functioning of the large hardon collider.”
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